V.

Where now the chosen bowers that once beheld Delight and Love their first bright sabbath keep? From all its founts the world of waters swell’d, And wrapt them in the mantle of the deep! For He, to whom the elements are slaves, In wrath unchain’d the oceans of the cloud, And heaved the abyss beneath, till waves on waves Folded creation in their mighty shroud; Then left the earth a solitude, o’erspread With its own awful weeks--a desert of the dead.