From Maffon's dome, and burst his sparry side;
Round his grey towers, and down his fringed walls,
From cliff to cliff, the liquid treasure falls;
185 In beds of stalactite, bright ores among,
O'er corals, shells, and crystals, winds along;
Crusts the green mosses, and the tangled wood,
And sparkling plunges to its parent flood.
--O'er the warm wave a smiling youth presides,
190 Attunes its murmurs, its meanders guides,

(The blooming FUCUS), in her sparry coves
To amorous Echo sings his _secret_ loves,
Bathes his fair forehead in the misty stream,
And with sweet breath perfumes the rising steam.
195 --So, erst, an Angel o'er Bethesda's springs,
Each morn descending, shook his dewy wings;
And as his bright translucent form He laves,
Salubrious powers enrich the troubled waves.

[_Fucus_.l. 191. Clandestine marriage. A species of Fucus,
or of Conserva, soon appears in all basons which contain water. Dr.
Priestley found that great quantities of pure dephlogisticated air were
given up in water at the points of this vegetable, particularly in
the sunshine, and that hence it contributed to preserve the water in
reservoirs from becoming putrid. The minute divisions of the leaves of
subaquatic plants, as mentioned in the note on Trapa, and of the gills
of fish, seem to serve another purpose besides that of increasing their
surface, which has not, I believe, been attended to, and that is to
facilitate the separation of the air, which is mechanically mixed or
chemically dissolved in water by their points or edges; this appears
on immersing a dry hairy leaf in water fresh from a pump; innumerable
globules like quicksilver appear on almost every point; for the
extremities of these points attract the particles of water less forcibly
than those particles attract each other; hence the contained air,
whose elasticity was but just balanced by the attractive power of the
surrounding particles of water to each other, finds at the point of each
fibre a place where the resistance to its expansion is less; and in
consequence it there expands, and becomes a bubble of air. It is easy to
foresee that the rays of the sunshine, by being refracted and in part
relieved by the two surfaces of these minute air-bubbles, must impart to
them much more heat than to the transparent water; and thus facilitate
their ascent by further exp