Sounding o’er our heads it knocked,
And then the very rock hath rocked,
And I have felt it shake unshocked:
Because I could have smiled to see
The death that would have set me free.”
Years drag themselves out to eternities. One by one his few companions die of cold and hunger, leaving him alone in that living tomb, with his endless, changeless, unutterable misery.
“I had no thought, no feeling—none.
Among the stones I stood a stone.
It was not night, it was not day,
For all was blank and bleak and gray: