The internet is a useful thing

    Still making my way through the Gutenberg text of The Woodlanders, slowly because the internet is a machine built of distractions and shinies. This morning I came across the following lines:

He could have declared with a contemporary poet--

"If I forget,
The salt creek may forget the ocean;
If I forget
The heart whence flows my heart's bright motion,
May I sink meanlier than the worst
Abandoned, outcast, crushed, accurst,
If I forget.

"Though you forget,
No word of mine shall mar your pleasure;
Though you forget,
You filled my barren life with treasure,
You may withdraw the gift you gave;
You still are queen, I still am slave,
Though you forget."

    Knowing he later became a poet I wondered if this were something he composed himself or if it were truly from elsewhere. I picked out a phrase which I expected to be relatively uncommon, "[t]he salt creek may forget the ocean[,]" and asked Google to find it for me, since whether it were Hardy's or someone else's it would be out of copyright by now. What turned up was this page of a book, where in footnote it is declared to be the work of one Edmund Gosse.
    As it turns out, the phrase is also used in a song 'Forever' by Sunchase, although since the page itself produces an error I had to check Google's cache to find out the other words. Also there was some confusion until babelfish informed me that paroles is a French word meaning 'words' and not the name of the band, which would explain why I could not find their songs elsewhere.