That steamed at every stroke. How periods passed And fields and forests teemed with gentler life, The waters wound in rivers to the sea, Then spread their vap’ry wings and fled to land. The oceans tossed in bondage patiently; Volcanic mountains closed their festering mouths, And Earth made ready for her master, Man. It traces Man, expelled from Paradise, Along the winding track of centuries. It marks his slow development, from two, To families, and tribes, and nations vast. It gazes on the wondrous scenes of war, And peace, and battle plain, and civic game; And lives through each, with all of real life, Except the body’s presence there. It turns From man to beasts and birds, and careless strokes The lion’s mane, the humbird’s scarlet throat. It tracks the mammoth to his jungle home, Or creeps within the infusoria’s cell. It measures Earth from pole to pole, or weighs The bit of brass, that lights the battery spark. Is Earth too small, it plumes its flight through space; From world to world, as bird from twig to twig, It flies, and furls its wing upon their discs, To tell their weight, and giant size, or breathe Their very air to find its gaseous parts. Now bathing in pale Saturn’s misty rings, Or chasing all the moons of Jupiter Behind his darkened cone. The glorious sun, With dazzling vapor robe, and seas of fire, Whose cyclones dart the forkèd flames far out, To lap so hungrily amid the stars, Is but its playhouse, where it rides the storms, That sweep vast trenches through the surging fire, In which the little Earth could roll unseen; Or bolder still, beyond our system’s bounds, It soars amid the wilderness of worlds; Finds one condemned to meet a doom of fire, And makes its very flames inscribe their names, In dusky lines, upon the spectroscope. With shuddering thought to see a world consumed, The fate prepared for ours, it lingers there Until the lurid conflagration dies. And then seeks Earth, and leaves the laggard, Light, To plod its journey vast. The smallest mote Of dust that settles on an insect’s wing, It can dissect to atoms ultimate. With these, too small for sight, may Fancy deal, And revel in her Lilliputian realm. These atoms forming all, by Boscovitch Are proved, in everything, to be alike; And ultimate, since indivisible. Each in its place maintained by innate force And relatively far from each, as Earth From Sun. Suppose, then, each to be a world, Peopled with busy life, a human flood, As earnest in their little plans as we, As grand in their opinion of themselves! Oh! what a depth of contrast for the mind! The finest grain of sand, upon the beach, Has in its form a million perfect worlds! Or take the other scale, suppose the Earth,