like stars,
  Branching like sea-weed, whirl’d in dazzling rings;
  Subtle and variable as flickering flames,
  Sight could not trace their evanescent changes,
  Nor comprehend their motions, till minute
  And curious observation caught the clew
  To this live labyrinth,—­where every one,
  By instinct taught, perform’d its little task;
  —­To build its dwelling and its sepulchre,
  From its own essence exquisitely modell’d;
  There breed, and die, and leave a progeny,
  Still multiplied beyond the reach of numbers. 
  To frame new cells and tombs; then breed and die,
  As all their ancestors had done,—­and rest,
  Hermetically sealed, each in its shrine,
  A statue in this temple of oblivion! 
  Millions of millions thus, from age to age,
  With simplest skill, and toil unwearyable. 
  No moment and no movement unimproved,
  Laid line on line, on terrace terrace spread,
  To swell the heightening, brightening gradual mound,
  By marvellous structure climbing tow’rds the day. 
  Each wrought alone, yet altogether wrought,
  Unconscious, not unworthy, instruments,
  By which a hand invisible was rearing
  A new creation in the secret deep. 
  Omnipotence wrought in them, with them, by them;
  Hence what Omnipotence alone could do,
  Worms did.  I saw the living pile ascend. 
  The mausoleum of its architects,
  Still dying upwards as their labours closed: 
  Slime the material, but the slime was turn’d
  To adamant, by their petrific touch;
  Frail were their frames, ephemeral their lives,
  Their masonry imperishable.  All
  Life’s needful functions, food, exertion, rest,
  By nice economy of Providence
  Were overruled to carry on the process. 
  Which out of water brought forth solid rock.

  “Atom by atom thus the burthen grew,
  Even like an infant in the womb, till Time
  Deliver’d ocean of that monstrous birth,
  —­A coral island, stretching east and west,
  In God’s own language to its parent saying,
  ’Thus far, no farther, shalt thou go; and here
  Shall thy proud waves be stay’d:’—­A point at first
  It peer’d above those waves; a point so small,
  I just perceived it, fix’d where all was floating: 
  And when a bubble cross’d it, the blue film
  Expanded like a sky above the speck;
  That speck became a hand-breadth; day and night
  It spread, accumulated, and ere long
  Presented to my view a dazzling plain. 
  White as the moon amid the sapphire sea;
  Bare at low water, and as still as death,
  But when the tide came gurgling o’er the surface,
  ’Twas like a resurrection of the dead: 
  From graves innumerable, punctures fine
  In the close coral, capillary swarms
  Of reptiles, horrent as Medusa’s snakes,
  Cover’d the bald-pate reef; then all was life,
  And indefatigable industry: