In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.
From his seminal work, this passage describes a moment of profound introspection and self-discovery, where an individual glimpses their inherent power and purpose amidst their struggles.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.