’O happy Earth! reality of Heaven! 
To which those restless souls that ceaselessly
Throng through the human universe, aspire;
Thou consummation of all mortal hope! 
Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will! 5
Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time,
Verge to one point and blend for ever there: 
Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place! 
Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,
Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come:  10
O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!

’Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams,
And dim forebodings of thy loveliness
Haunting the human heart, have there entwined
Those rooted hopes of some sweet place of bliss 15
Where friends and lovers meet to part no more. 
Thou art the end of all desire and will,
The product of all action; and the souls
That by the paths of an aspiring change
Have reached thy haven of perpetual peace, 20
There rest from the eternity of toil
That framed the fabric of thy perfectness.

’Even Time, the conqueror, fled thee in his fear;
That hoary giant, who, in lonely pride,
So long had ruled the world, that nations fell 25
Beneath his silent footstep.  Pyramids,
That for millenniums had withstood the tide
Of human things, his storm-breath drove in sand
Across that desert where their stones survived
The name of him whose pride had heaped them there. 30
Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp,
Was but the mushroom of a summer day,
That his light-winged footstep pressed to dust: 
Time was the king of earth:  all things gave way
Before him, but the fixed and virtuous will, 35
The sacred sympathies of soul and sense,
That mocked his fury and prepared his fall.

’Yet slow and gradual dawned the morn of love;
Long lay the clouds of darkness o’er the scene,
Till from its native Heaven they rolled away:  40
First, Crime triumphant o’er all hope careered
Unblushing, undisguising, bold and strong;
Whilst Falsehood, tricked in Virtue’s attributes,
Long sanctified all deeds of vice and woe,
Till done by her own venomous sting to death, 45
She left the moral world without a law,
No longer fettering Passion’s fearless wing,—­
Nor searing Reason with the brand of God. 
Then steadily the happy ferment worked;
Reason was free; and wild though Passion went 50
Through tangled glens and wood-embosomed meads,
Gathering a garland of the strangest flowers,
Yet like the bee returning to her queen,
She bound the sweetest on her sister’s brow,
Who meek and sober kissed the sportive child, 55
No longer trembling at the broken rod.