Weary and travel-stained and sick at heart,
With a great wound gotten in that last fray
Ere he stood by, and watched the King depart
Down the long, silent reaches of the mere:
And all the earth was sad, and skies were drear,
And the wind cried, and chased the relict leaves
Like ships, that the storm-tossed ocean batters and heaves,
And they fly before the gale, and the mariners fear.
So he found at the last an hermitage
Hard by a little hill, and sheltering trees