Page:Moyarra- An Australian Legend in Two Cantos, 1891.djvu/69

The gardens of art, of every race:—
Is it not sweet? Then fling
But one small branch of some loathed thing
In the dank marsh whose stem is reared
(By man abhorred, by wild beasts feared)
The vapours of whose pestilent breath
Might antedate the sense of death;—
⁠And thou shalt find that drug hath power
To corrupt the sense of each precious flower—
'Mid all their odours to infuse
The venom of its poisonous juice.

⁠Thus, of our earth each varied joy
That ceaseless curse hath power to cloy:
Ever present, never weary;
Ready, with its bodings dreary,
Our most prized bliss to infect
Making it of none effect.
⁠Crushed by such consciousness of doom
Is there no hope that, proudly flinging,
Like storm-drops from the eagle's plume.
The dross which, to our spirits clinging,
Obstructs our course—erect in conscious worth
We may arise, the demigods of earth?