A small sweet world of wave-encompassed wonder
Kept from the wearier landward world asunder
With violence of wild waters, and with thunder
Of many winds as one,
To where the keen sea-current grinds and frets
The black bright sheer twin flameless Altarlets
That lack no live blood-sacrifice they crave
Of shipwreck and the shrine-subservient wave,
Having for priest the storm-wind, and for choir
Lightnings and clouds whose prayer and praise are fire,
All the isle acclaimed him coming; she, the least
Of all things loveliest that the sea’s love hides
From strange men’s insult, walled about with tides
That bid strange guests back from her flower-strewn feast,
Set all her fields aflower, her flowers aflame,
To applaud him that he came. 
Nor surely flashed not something of delight
Through that steep strait of rock whose twin-cliffed height
Links crag with crag reiterate, land with land,
By one sheer thread of narrowing precipice
Bifront, that binds and sunders
Abyss from hollower imminent abyss
And wilder isle with island, blind for bliss
Of sea that lightens and of wind that thunders;
Nor pealed not surely back from deep to steep
Reverberate acclamation, steep to deep
Inveterately reclaiming and replying
Praise, and response applausive; nor the sea,
For all the sea-wind’s crying,
Knew not the song her sister, even as she
Thundering, or like her confluent spring-tides brightening,
And like her darkness lightening;
The song that moved about him silent, now
Both soundless wings refolded and refurled
On that Promethean brow,
Then quivering as for flight that wakes the world.

From the roots of the rocks underlying the gulfs that engird it around
          
                                                  [Str. 8. 
Was the isle not enkindled with light of him landing, or thrilled not
    with sound? 
Yea, surely the sea like a harper laid hand on the shore as a lyre,
As the lyre in his own for a birthright of old that was given of his sire,
And the hand of the child was put forth on the chords yet alive and aflame
From the hand of the God that had wrought it in heaven; and the hand was
    the same. 
And the tongue of the child spake, singing; and never a note that he sang,
But the strings made answer unstricken, as though for the God they rang. 
And the eyes of the child shone, lightening; and touched as by life at his
    nod,
They shuddered with music, and quickened as though from the glance of the
    God. 
So trembled the heart of the hills and the rocks to receive him, and
    yearned
With desirous delight of his presence and love that beholding him burned. 
Yea, down through the mighty twin hollows where never the sunlight shall
    be,
Deep sunk under imminent earth, and subdued to the stress of the sea,
That feel when the dim week changes by change of their