Elegiacs

Wearily stretches the sand to the surge, and the surge to the cloudland; Wearily onward I ride, watching the water alone. Not as of old, like Homeric Achilles, ??de? ya???, Joyous knight-errant of God, thirsting for labour and strife; No more on magical steed borne free through the regions of ether, But, like the hack which I ride, selling my sinew for gold. Fruit-bearing autumn is gone; let the sad quiet winter hang o'er me- What were the spring to a soul laden with sorrow and shame? Blossoms would fret me with beauty; my heart has no time to bepraise them; Gray rock, bough, surge, cloud, waken no yearning within. Sing not, thou sky-lark above! even angels pass hushed by the weeper. Scream on, ye sea-fowl! my heart echoes your desolate cry. Sweep the dry sand on, thou wild wind, to drift o'er the shell and the sea- weed; Sea-weed and shell, like my dreams, swept down the pitiless tide. Just is the wave which uptore us; 'tis Nature's own law which condemns us; Woe to the weak who, in pride, build on the faith of the sand! Joy to the oak of the mountain: he trusts to the might of the rock-clefts; Deeply he mines, and in peace feeds on the wealth of the stone. Morte Sands, Devonshire, February 1849.