In the mystical moist night-air

A Larger View

Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add,

divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured

with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.