There walks a Spirit o’er the peopled earth,
Secret his progress is, unknown his birth;
Moody and viewless as the changing wind,
No force arrests his foot, no chains can bind;
Where’er he turns, the human brute awakes,
And, roused to better life, his sordid hut forsakes: 
He thinks, he reasons, glows with purer fires,
Feels finer wants, and burns with new desires: 
Obedient Nature follows where he leads;
The steaming marsh is changed to fruitful meads;
The beasts retire from man’s asserted reign,
And prove his kingdom was not given in vain. 
Then from its bed is drawn the ponderous ore, [18]
Then Commerce pours her gifts on every shore,
Then Babel’s towers and terrassed gardens rise,
And pointed obelisks invade the skies;
The prince commands, in Tyrian purple drest,
And Ægypt’s virgins weave the linen vest. 
Then spans the graceful arch the roaring tide,
And stricter bounds the cultured fields divide. 
Then kindles Fancy, then expands the heart,
Then blow the flowers of Genius and of Art;
Saints, Heroes, Sages, who the land adorn,
Seem rather to descend than to be born;
Whilst History, midst the rolls consigned to fame,
With pen of adamant inscribes their name.

The Genius now forsakes the favoured shore, [19]
And hates, capricious, what he loved before;
Then empires fall to dust, then arts decay,
And wasted realms enfeebled despots sway;
Even Nature’s changed; without his fostering smile
Ophir no gold, no plenty yields the Nile;
The thirsty sand absorbs the useless rill,
And spotted plagues from putrid fens distill. 
In desert solitudes then Tadmor sleeps,
Stern Marius then o’er fallen Carthage weeps;
Then with enthusiast love the pilgrim roves
To seek his footsteps in forsaken groves,
Explores the fractured arch, the ruined tower,
Those limbs disjointed of gigantic power;
Still at each step he dreads the adder’s sting, [20]
The Arab’s javelin, or the tiger’s spring;
With doubtful caution treads the echoing ground. 
And asks where Troy or Babylon is found.

And now the vagrant Power no more detains
The vale of Tempe, or Ausonian plains;
Northward he throws the animating ray,
O’er Celtic nations bursts the mental day: 
And, as some playful child the mirror turns,
Now here now there the moving lustre burns;
Now o’er his changeful fancy more prevail
Batavia’s dykes than Arno’s purple vale,
And stinted suns, and rivers bound with frost,
Than Enna’s plains or Baia’s viny coast;
Venice the Adriatic weds in vain, [21]
And Death sits brooding o’er Campania’s plain;
O’er Baltic shores and through Hercynian groves,
Stirring the soul, the mighty impulse moves;
Art plies his tools, arid Commerce spreads her sail,
And wealth is wafted in each shifting gale.