Where are ye
  Thrones of the Western wave, fair Islands green? 
  Where are your moonlight halls, your cedarn glooms,
  The blossoming abysses of your hills? 
  Your flowering Capes and your gold-sanded bays
  Blown round with happy airs of odorous winds? 
  Where are the infinite ways which, Seraphtrod,
  Wound thro’ your great Elysian solitudes,
  Whose lowest depths were, as with visible love,
  Fill’d with Divine effulgence, circumfus’d,
  Flowing between the clear and polish’d stems,
  And ever circling round their emerald cones
  In coronals and glories, such as gird
  The unfading foreheads of the Saints in Heaven? 
  For nothing visible, they say, had birth
  In that blest ground but it was play’d about
  With its peculiar glory.  Then I rais’d
  My voice and cried ’Wide Afric, doth thy Sun
  Lighten, thy hills enfold a City as fair
  As those which starr’d the night o’ the Elder World? 
  Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo
  A dream as frail as those of ancient Time?’

  A curve of whitening, flashing, ebbing light! 
  A rustling of white wings!  The bright descent
  Of a young Seraph! and he stood beside me
  There on the ridge, and look’d into my face
  With his unutterable, shining orbs,
  So that with hasty motion I did veil
  My vision with both hands, and saw before me
  Such colour’d spots as dance athwart the eyes
  Of those that gaze upon the noonday Sun. 
  Girt with a Zone of flashing gold beneath
  His breast, and compass’d round about his brow
  With triple arch of everchanging bows,
  And circled with the glory of living light
  And alternations of all hues, he stood. 
  ’O child of man, why muse you here alone
  Upon the Mountain, on the dreams of old
  Which fill’d the Earth with passing loveliness,
  Which flung strange music on the howling winds,
  And odours rapt from remote Paradise? 
  Thy sense is clogg’d with dull mortality,
  Thy spirit fetter’d with the bond of clay: 
  Open thine eye and see.’

                    I look’d, but not
  Upon his face, for it was wonderful
  With its exceeding brightness, and the light
  Of the great angel mind which look’d from out
  The starry glowing of his restless eyes. 
  I felt my soul grow mighty, and my spirit
  With supernatural excitation bound
  Within me, and my mental eye grew large
  With such a vast circumference of thought,
  That in my vanity I seem’d to stand
  Upon the outward verge and bound alone
  Of full beatitude.  Each failing sense
  As with a momentary flash of light
  Grew thrillingly distinct and keen.  I saw
  The smallest grain that dappled the dark Earth,
  The indistinctest atom in deep air,
  The Moon’s white cities, and the opal width
  Of her small glowing lakes, her silver