Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold;

Or, in their pearly shells at ease, attend

Moist nutriment; or under rocks their food

In jointed armour watch: on smooth the seal

And bended dolphins play: part huge of bulk

Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gait,

Tempest the ocean: there leviathan,

Hugest of living creatures, on the deep

Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,

And seems a moving land; and at his gills

Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out, a sea.

Meanwhile the tepid caves, and fens, and shores,

Their brood as numerous hatch, from the egg that soon

Bursting with kindly rupture forth disclosed

Their callow young; but feathered soon and fledge

They summed their pens; and, soaring the air sublime,

With clang despised the ground, under a cloud

In prospect; there the eagle and the stork

On cliffs and cedar tops their eyries build:

Part loosely wing the region, part more wise

In common, ranged in figure, wedge their way,

Intelligent of seasons, and set forth

Their aery caravan, high over seas

Flying, and over lands, with mutual wing

Easing their flight; so steers the prudent crane

Her annual voyage, borne on winds; the air

Floats as they pass, fanned with unnumbered plumes:

From branch to branch the smaller birds with song

Solaced the woods, and spread their painted wings

Till even; nor then the solemn nightingale

Ceased warbling, but all night tun’d her soft lays:

Others, on silver lakes and rivers, bathed

Their downy breast; the swan with arched neck,

Between her white wings mantling proudly, rows

Her state with oary feet; yet oft they quit

The dank, and, rising on stiff pennons, tower

The mid aereal sky: Others on ground

Walked firm; the crested cock whose clarion sounds

The silent hours, and the other whose gay train

Adorns him, coloured with the florid hue

Of rainbows and starry eyes. The waters thus

With fish replenished, and the air with fowl,

Evening and morn solemnized the fifth day.

The sixth, and of creation last, arose

With evening harps and matin; when God said,

‘Let the Earth bring forth soul living in her kind,

Cattle, and creeping things, and beast of the Earth,

Each in their kind.’ The Earth obeyed, and straight

Opening her fertile womb teemed at a birth

Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms,

Limbed and full grown: Out of the ground up rose,

As from his lair, the wild beast where he wons

In forest wild, in thicket, brake, or den;

Among the trees in pairs they rose, they walked:

The cattle in the fields and meadows green:

Those rare and solitary, these in flocks

Pasturing at once, and in broad herds upsprung.

The grassy clods now calved; now half appeared

The tawny lion, pawing to get free

His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,

And rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce,

The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole

Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw