Crossword-Solution: DROPSIED 8 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

There seems something so ghastly, so spectral, in the mockery of their unnecessary circuit, their impregnable strength, their countless towers, arrogating to themselves the circumference of a day's journey--and all for what? To guard a city, which, once dropsied with grandeur, has now shrunk with the disease into comparative atrophy; a city, which, having boastfully demanded their aid, has now abandoned them for miles.

She gropes and hobbies, where the dropsied rocks Are hairy with the lichens and the twist Of knotted wolf's-bane, mumbling in the mist, Hawk-nosed and wrinkle-eyed with scrawny locks.

Behind her, high the silvered summit slopes Of strength and faith, she will not turn to view; But towards the cave of weakness, harsh of hue, She goes, where all the dropsied horror ropes.

There hungry dogs from hungry children steal, There pigs and chickens quarrel for a meal; There dropsied infants wail without redress, And all is want and woe and wretchedness: Yet should these boys, with bodies bronz’d and bare, High-swoln and hard, outlive that lack of care-- Forc’d on some farm, the unexerted strength, Though loth to action, is compell’d at length, When warm’d by health, as serpents in the spring, Aside their slough of indolence they fling.