There is a magic in the midnight sky;
In tinted arctic dawns that gild the snow;
In golden, sunlit jungles of Khitai;
The glory of a Persian sunset’s afterglow;

In the aurora’s weird, unearthly light,
Where stars are eyes obscured behind a veil
Of dancing amethyst and malachite;
The vivid transience of the meteor’s trail;

The silence of a ruined city of the waste;
Moonrise that dapples the deserted plain;
A solitary island by wild seas embraced;
By blind, perpetual tides that surge and race

To thunder on the skyward-reaching shore in vain;
In trackless forest; in high peaks cloaked in a shroud
Of evening mist; in galleon-sails of summer cloud;
In all the endless beauty that this world contains...