C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Sonnet: On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

MY spirit is too weak: mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep;

And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die,

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceivèd glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main—

A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.