To rest at ease, nor dread intruding ill. 
  Plants of superior growth now sprang apace,
  With moon-like blossoms crown’d, or starry glories;
  Light flexible shrubs among the greenwood play’d
  Fantastic freaks,—­they crept, they climb’d, they budded,
  And hung their flowers and berries in the sun;
  As the breeze taught, they danced, they sung, they twined
  Their sprays in bowers, or spread the ground with net-work. 
  Through the slow lapse of undivided time,
  Silently rising from their buried germs,
  Trees lifted to the skies their stately heads,
  Tufted with verdure, like depending plumage,
  O’er stems unknotted, waving to the wind: 
  Of these in graceful form, and simple beauty,
  The fruitful cocoa and the fragrant palm
  Excell’d the wilding daughters of the wood,
  That stretch’d unwieldy their enormous arms,
  Clad with luxuriant foliage, from the trunk,
  Like the old eagle, feather’d to the heel;
  While every fibre, from the lowest root
  To the last leaf upon the topmost twig,
  Was held by common sympathy, diffusing
  Through all the complex frame unconscious life. 
  Such was the locust with its hydra boughs,
  A hundred heads on one stupendous trunk;
  And such the mangrove, which, at full-moon flood,
  Appear’d itself a wood upon the waters,
  But when the tide left bare its upright roots,
  A wood on piles suspended in the air;
  Such too the Indian fig, that built itself
  Into a sylvan temple, arch’d aloof
  With airy aisles and living colonnades,
  Where nations might have worshipp’d God in peace. 
  From year to year their fruits ungather’d fell;
  Not lost, but quickening where they lay, they struck
  Root downward, and brake forth on every hand,
  Till the strong saplings, rank and file, stood up,
  A mighty army, which o’erran the isle,
  And changed the wilderness into a forest. 
  All this appear’d accomplish’d in the space
  Between the morning and the evening star: 
  So, in his third day’s work, Jehovah spake,
  And Earth, an infant, naked as she came
  Out of the womb of chaos, straight put on
  Her beautiful attire, and deck’d her robe
  Of verdure with ten thousand glorious flowers,
  Exhaling incense; crown’d her mountain-heads
  With cedars, train’d her vines around their girdles,
  And pour’d spontaneous harvests at their feet. 
  Nor were those woods without inhabitants
  Besides the ephemera of earth and air;
  —­Where glid the sunbeams through the latticed boughs,
  And fell like dew-drops on the spangled ground,
  To light the diamond-beetle on his way;
  —­Where cheerful openings let the sky look down
  Into the very heart of solitude,
  On little garden-pots of social flowers,
  That crowded from the shades to peep at daylight;
  —­Or where unpermeable foliage made