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.