Every time I scan through the back issues of the Clarksville (TN.) Chronicle, I find another gem. In the Jan. 20th, 1846 issue, I stumbled across the fine writing of a remarkable gentleman who called himself “The Learned Blacksmith.” Similar to another working class autodidact, the Scottish stone-carver Hugh Miller, Burritt had a distinct gift for languages, and a flair for descriptive writing. Largely forgotten today, Burritt was no doubt well known to Emily Dickinson both in his popular volumes, and in his numerous newspaper appearances over the years.

ED’s “I like to see it lap the Miles–” dates (according to Seward) from the 1850’s, but I can’t doubt but that a poet of her gifts would not have been struck by Burritt’s description of an “iron horse” enough to have remembered it.

Here is the passage from the paper.

“The Steam Horse

Elihu Burritt has a better fancy for a steam horse than we remember to have met elsewhere before. This is his way of describing him:

I love to see one of those huge creatures, with sinews of brass and muscles of iron, strut forth from his smoky stable, and saluting the long train of cars with a dozen sonorous puffs from his iron nostrils, fall gently back into his harness. There he stands, champing and foaming upon the iron track, his great heart a furnace of glowing coals; lymphatic blood is boiling in his veins; the strength of a thousand horses is nerving his sinews, he pants to be gone. He would ’snake’ St. Peter’s across the desert of Sahara, if he could be fairly hitched to it; but there is a little sober-eyed man in the saddle who holds him with a finger, who can take away his breath in a moment, should he grow restive and vicious. I am always deeply interested in this man; for begrimed as he may be with coal, diluted in oil and steam, I habitually regard him as the genius of the whole machinery, as the physical mind of that huge steam horse.”

ED’s poem:

I like to see it lap the Miles–
And lick the Valleys up–
And stop to feed itself at Tanks–
And then–prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains–
And supercilious peer
In Shanties–by the sides of Roads–
And then a Quarry pare

To fit its Ribs
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid–hooting stanza–
Then chase itself down Hill–

And neigh like Boanerges–
Then–punctual as a Star
Stop–docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door.

Of course, ED’s poem goes well beyond Burritt’s description in boldness of invention and plain linguistic brilliance, but still the similarities give one pause.