heights
  Unvisited with dew of vagrant cloud,
  And the unsounded, undescended depth
  Of her black hollows.  The clear Galaxy
  Shorn of its hoary lustre, wonderful,
  Distinct and vivid with sharp points of light
  Blaze within blaze, an unimagin’d depth
  And harmony of planet-girded Suns
  And moon-encircled planets, wheel in wheel,
  Arch’d the wan Sapphire.  Nay, the hum of men,
  Or other things talking in unknown tongues,
  And notes of busy life in distant worlds
  Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear.

  A maze of piercing, trackless, thrilling thoughts
  Involving and embracing each with each
  Rapid as fire, inextricably link’d,
  Expanding momently with every sight
  And sound which struck the palpitating sense,
  The issue of strong impulse, hurried through
  The riv’n rapt brain:  as when in some large lake
  From pressure of descendant crags, which lapse
  Disjointed, crumbling from their parent slope
  At slender interval, the level calm
  Is ridg’d with restless and increasing spheres
  Which break upon each other, each th’ effect
  Of separate impulse, but more fleet and strong
  Than its precursor, till the eyes in vain
  Amid the wild unrest of swimming shade
  Dappled with hollow and alternate rise
  Of interpenetrated arc, would scan
  Definite round. 
                   I know not if I shape
  These things with accurate similitude
  From visible objects, for but dimly now,
  Less vivid than a half-forgotten dream,
  The memory of that mental excellence
  Comes o’er me, and it may be I entwine
  The indecision of my present mind
  With its past clearness, yet it seems to me
  As even then the torrent of quick thought
  Absorbed me from the nature of itself
  With its own fleetness.  Where is he that, borne
  Adown the sloping of an arrowy stream,
  Could link his shallop to the fleeting edge,
  And muse midway with philosophic calm
  Upon the wondrous laws which regulate
  The fierceness of the bounding element? 
  My thoughts which long had grovell’d in the slime
  Of this dull world, like dusky worms which house
  Beneath unshaken waters, but at once
  Upon some earth-awakening day of spring
  Do pass from gloom to glory, and aloft
  Winnow the purple, bearing on both sides
  Double display of starlit wings which burn
  Fanlike and fibred, with intensest bloom: 
  E’en so my thoughts, erewhile so low, now felt
  Unutterable buoyancy and strength
  To bear them upward through the trackless fields
  Of undefin’d existence far and free.