What an Indian Thought When He Saw the Comet

Flaming wonderer! that dost leave vaunting, proud

Ambition boasting its lightning fringed

Immensity—cleaving wings, gaudy dipp’d

In sunset’s blossoming splendors bright and

Tinsel fire, with puny flight fluttering

Far behind! Thou that art cloth’d in mistery

More startling and more glorious than thine own

Encircling fires—profound as the oceans

Of shoreless space through which now thou flyest!

Art thou some erring world now deep engulph’d

In hellish, Judgement fires, with phrenzied ire

And fury hot, like some dread sky rocket

Of Eternity, flaming, vast, plunging

Thro’ immensity, scatt’ring in thy track

The wrathful fires of thine own damnation

Or wingest thou with direful speed, the ear

Of some flaming god of far off systems

Within these skies unheard of and unknown?

Ye Gods! How proud the thought to mount this orb

Of fire—boom thro’ the breathless oceans vast

Of big immensity—quickly leaving

Far behind all that for long ages gone

Dull, gray headed dames have prated of—

Travel far off mystic eternities—

Then proudly, on this little twisting ball

Returning once more set foot, glowing with

The splendors of a vast intelligence—

Frizzling little, puny humanity

Into icy horrors—bursting the big

Wide-spread eyeball of dismay—to recount

Direful regions travers’d and wonders seen!

Why I’d be as great a man as Fremont

Who cross’d the Rocky Mountains, didn’t freeze

And’s got a gold mine!