Land after land his passing notice claim, And hills by hundreds rise without a name; Hills yet unsung, their mystic powers untold; Celestials there no sacred senates hold; No chain'd Prometheus feasts the vulture there, No Cyclop forges thro their summits glare, To Phrygian Jove no victim smoke is curl'd, Nor ark high landing quits a deluged world. But were these masses piled on Asia's shore, Taurus would shrink, Hemodia strut no more, Indus and Ganges scorn their humble sires, And rising suns salute superior fires; Whose watchful priest would meet, with matin blaze, His earlier God, and sooner chaunt his praise. For here great nature, with a bolder hand, Roll'd the broad stream, and heaved the lifted land; And here from finish'd earth, triumphant trod The last ascending steps of her creating God. He saw these mountains ope their watery stores, Floods quit their caves and seek the distant shores; Wild thro disparting plains their waves expand, And lave the banks where future towns must stand. Whirl'd from the monstrous Andes' bursting sides, Maragnon leads his congregating tides; A thousand Alps for him dissolve their snow, A thousand Rhones obedient bend below, From different zones their ways converging wind, Sweep beds of ore, and leave their gold behind, In headlong cataracts indignant rave, Rush to his banks and swell the swallowing wave. Ucayla, first of all his mighty sons, From Cusco's walls a wearied journey runs; Pastaza mines proud Pambamarca's base, And holds thro sundering hills his lawless race; Aloft, where Cotopaxa flames on high, The roaring Napo quits his misty sky, Down the long steeps in whitening torrents driven, Like Nile descending from his fabled heaven; Mound after mound impetuous Tigris rends, Curved Ista folds whole countries in his bends; Vast Orinoco, summon'd forth to bring His far fetch'd honors to the sateless king, Drives on his own strong course to gain the shore, But sends Catuba here with half his store; Like a broad Bosphorus here Negro guides The gather'd mass of fifty furious tides; From his waste world, by nameless fountains fed, Wild Purus wears his long and lonely bed; O'er twelve degrees of earth Madera flows, And robs the south of half its treasured snows; Zingus, of equal length and heavier force, Rolls on, for months, the same continuous course To reach his master's bank; that here constrains Topayo, charged with all Brazilians rains; While inland seas, and lakes unknown to fame, Send their full tributes to the monarch stream; Who, swell'd with growing conquest, wheels abroad, Drains every land, and gathers all his flood; Then far from clime to clime majestic goes, Enlarging, widening, deepening as he flows; Like heaven's broad milky way he shines alone, Spreads o'er the globe its equatorial zone, Weighs the cleft continent, and pushes wide