Its way over the sea, and sport therein;
For round the walls are hung dread engines, such
As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch
Ixion or the Titan:—­or the quick
Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic, 25
To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic,
Or those in philanthropic council met,
Who thought to pay some interest for the debt
They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation,
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation 30
To Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and the rest
Who made our land an island of the blest,
When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire
On Freedom’s hearth, grew dim with Empire:—­
With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and jag, 35
Which fishers found under the utmost crag
Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles,
Where to the sky the rude sea rarely smiles
Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn
When the exulting elements in scorn, 40
Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay
Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
As panthers sleep;—­and other strange and dread
Magical forms the brick floor overspread,—­
Proteus transformed to metal did not make 45
More figures, or more strange; nor did he take
Such shapes of unintelligible brass,
Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron not to be understood;
And forms of unimaginable wood, 50
To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood: 
Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved blocks,
The elements of what will stand the shocks
Of wave and wind and time.—­Upon the table
More knacks and quips there be than I am able 55
To catalogize in this verse of mine:—­
A pretty bowl of wood—­not full of wine,
But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink
When at their subterranean toil they swink,
Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who 60
Reply to them in lava—­cry halloo! 
And call out to the cities o’er their head,—­
Roofs, towers, and shrines, the dying and the dead,
Crash through the chinks of earth—­and then all quaff
Another rouse, and hold their sides and laugh. 65
This quicksilver no gnome has drunk—­within
The walnut bowl it lies, veined and thin,
In colour like the wake of light that stains
The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains
The inmost shower of its white fire—­the breeze 70
Is still—­blue Heaven smiles over the pale seas. 
And in this bowl of quicksilver—­for I
Yield to the impulse of an infancy
Outlasting manhood—­I have made to float
A rude idealism of a paper boat:—­ 75
A hollow screw with cogs—­Henry will know