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