A vision as of crowded city streets,
  With human life in endless overflow;
  Thunder of thoroughfares; trumpets that blow
  To battle; clamor, in obscure retreats,
Of sailors landed from their anchored fleets;
  Tolling of bells in turrets, and below
  Voices of children, and bright flowers that throw
  O’er garden-walls their intermingled sweets! 
This vision comes to me when I unfold
  The volume of the Poet paramount,
  Whom all the Muses loved, not one alone;—­
Into his hands they put the lyre of gold,
  And, crowned with sacred laurel at their fount,
  Placed him as Musagetes on their throne.

MILTON

I pace the sounding sea-beach and behold
  How the voluminous billows roll and run,
  Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun
  Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled,
And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold
  All its loose-flowing garments into one,
  Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun
  Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold. 
So in majestic cadence rise and fall
  The mighty undulations of thy song,
  O sightless bard, England’s Maeonides! 
And ever and anon, high over all
  Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong,
  Floods all the soul with its melodious seas.

KEATS

The young Endymion sleeps Endymion’s sleep;
  The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told! 
  The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold
  To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
The nightingale is singing from the steep;
  It is midsummer, but the air is cold;
  Can it be death?  Alas, beside the fold
  A shepherd’s pipe lies shattered near his sheep. 
Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,
  On which I read:  “Here lieth one whose name
  Was writ in water.”  And was this the meed
Of his sweet singing?  Rather let me write: 
  “The smoking flax before it burst to flame
  Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed.”

THE GALAXY

Torrent of light and river of the air,
  Along whose bed the glimmering stars are seen
  Like gold and silver sands in some ravine
  Where mountain streams have left their channels bare! 
The Spaniard sees in thee the pathway, where
  His patron saint descended in the sheen
  Of his celestial armor, on serene
  And quiet nights, when all the heavens were fair. 
Not this I see, nor yet the ancient fable
  Of Phaeton’s wild course, that scorched the skies
  Where’er the hoofs of his hot coursers trod;
But the white drift of worlds o’er chasms of sable,
  The star-dust that is whirled aloft and flies
  From the invisible chariot-wheels of God.

THE SOUND OF THE SEA