What is Hell's daily bread?

That irresistible impulse to be continuously doing the works of your earthly life—

To pursue—

With a burning greed—

A vain and shadowy existence may well be termed hell's daily bread. 

The evil desire alone is real—

The sense that might lend it expression is dead. 

You have heard of Tantalus and Sisyphus—

It may help you to conceive our state. 

All is illusion here—

The very fire I told you of—

Raging, in imagination merely, within us that is—

Yet what an awful reality!