"So the man groped for light;

all this was not Life, -- it was the world-wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving of one who vainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a death that is more than death, -- the passing of a soul that has missed its duty. Twenty years he wandered, --twenty years and more; and yet the hard rasping question kept gnawing within him, "What, in God's name, am I on earth for?"

-W.E.B. Du Bois, "Of Alexander Crummell." The Souls of Black Folk, p. 138.