I see them walking in an air of glory
Whose light doth trample on my days,
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.

These lines are from Henry Vaughan’s devotional lyric “They Are All Gone into the World of Light,” first published in his collection *Silex Scintillans* (1650; enlarged 1655). Vaughan (1621–1695), a Welsh metaphysical poet writing in the aftermath of the English Civil Wars, often meditates on mortality, loss, and the soul’s longing for divine reality. In this poem he contemplates deceased loved ones—figures he imagines as already translated into heavenly “light”—and contrasts their transfigured state with his own diminished, time-worn earthly life. The passage occurs early in the poem as the speaker’s vision of the blessed dead intensifies his sense of exile and spiritual yearning.

The speaker beholds the departed as moving “in an air of glory,” their radiance so intense it seems to “trample” his ordinary days. The contrast is double: heavenly light versus earthly dimness, and eternal vitality versus temporal “decays.” “Dull and hoary” suggests not only aging but spiritual fatigue—life under time’s erosion. The lines dramatize a metaphysical theme central to Vaughan: the world’s true brightness lies beyond the visible, and the saints (or beloved dead) participate in a higher order of being. The speaker’s envy is inseparable from hope; the very pain of comparison becomes a spur toward conversion, remembrance, and desire for union with the divine.