’Tis not the setting sun, whose drooping lid Closed on the weary world at half-past six; ’Tis not the rising moon, whose rays are hid Behind the city’s sombre piles of bricks. It is the Drummond Light, that from the top Of Barnum’s massive pile, sky-mingling there, Darts its quick gleam o’er every shadowed shop, And gilds Broadway with unaccustomed glare. There o’er the sordid gloom, whose deep’ning tracks Furrow the city’s brow, the front of ages, Thy loftier light descends on cabs and hacks, And on two dozen different lines of stages! 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 Far from the Barcan deserts now withdrawn, There huge constrictors coil their scaly backs; There, cased in glass, malignant and unshorn, Old murderers glare in sullenness and wax.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 Await thee yet! I, Jenny Lind, who reigned Sublimely throned, the imperial queen of song, Wooed by thy golden harmonies, have deigned Captive to join the heterogeneous throng. Sustained by an unfaltering trust in coin, Dealt from thy hand, O thou illustrious man, Gladly I heard the summons come to join Myself the innumerable caravan.