O twilight Sun, with thy far darting ray,
Thou art a type of him whose tireless hands
Hung thee on high to guide the stranger’s way,
Where, in its pride, his vast Museum stands.
Him, who in search of wonders new and strange,
Grasps the wide skirts of Nature’s mystic robe
Explores the circles of eternal change,
And the dark chambers of the central globe.
He, from the reedy shores of fabled Nile,
Has brought, thick-ribbed and ancient as old iron,
That venerable beast the crocodile,
And many a skin of many a famous lion.
Go lose thyself in those continuous halls,
Where strays the fond papa with son and daughter
And all that charms or startles or appals,
Thou shalt behold, and for a single quarter!
Far from the Barcan deserts now withdrawn,
There huge constrictors coil their scaly backs;
There, cased in glass, malignant and unshorn,
Old murderers glare in sullenness and wax.
There many a varied form the sight beguiles,
In rusty broadcloth decked and shocking hat,
And there the unwieldy Lambert sits and smiles,
In the majestic plenitude of fat.
Or for thy gayer hours, the orang-outang
Or ape salutes thee with his strange grimace,
And in their shapes, stuffed as on earth they sprang,
Thine individual being thou canst trace!
And joys the youth in life’s green spring, who goes
With the sweet babe and the gray-headed nurse,
To see those Cosmoramic orbs disclose
The varied beauties of the universe.
And last, not least, the marvellous Ethiope,
Changing his skin by preternatural skill,
Whom every setting sun’s diurnal slope
Leaves whiter than the last, and whitening still.
All that of monstrous, scaly, strange and queer,
Has come from out the womb of earliest time,
Thou hast, O Barnum, in thy keeping here,
Nor is this all—for triumphs more sublime