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.