The thoughts and emotions of this bewildering moment it is impossible to describe. Our craft moved off majestically, like some huge water-fowl rising from the sea. Her course was westward and upward, like the eagle with his face turned toward the palace of the sun. At first the lights in the city of Baltimore became more numerous and distinct, as intervening objects were surmounted and overlooked. Next they began to fade, shrinking down into twinkling points like fireflies, until they disappeared. Forests, hills, and mountains followed after, as our altitude was increased, blending together like a hazy landscape, until, on passing above the cloud region, and finding the level of our track, the earth was wholly lost to our view, and our course lay through the blue serene of space, without a lighthouse or a landmark, and nothing but the constant lamps of heaven to guide us in our passage.
What a sea! The ocean has its visible surface on which move the ships; but we had none. The heavens were beneath us as well as above. We were floating in the great circle of the systems and the suns. We were of the universe; but were to be numbered with the constellations and the stars. We could compare ourselves to a company of immortals quitting the earth and traversing the electric seas which lead to brighter homes. Or we were voyagers to the sun, or to the nearer Venus, or to the far distant Centaurus. What a world of new thought was forced upon us by the fancies and realities and charm and awe of our extraordinary condition, combined with the profound consciousness we could not fail to entertain of the effects which this crowning discovery of Messrs. Bonflon and De Aëry must produce on travel, on commerce, on art, and the common destiny of mankind!
I found the atmosphere of the cabins, as my friend Bonflon had asserted, agreeable and healthful. I could also occupy the promenade deck for half an hour with little inconvenience, so far as the levity of the air was concerned; but the cold was severe; while the system, in consequence of an undue expansion of its particles, solid and fluid, from the diminished pressure of the atmosphere, was rendered doubly susceptible to its influence. The advice given by Mr. Bonflon to case myself in flannels, with an armament at hand of outer winter clothing, proved well-timed; and yet a period of lassitude, verging on faintness, invariably followed every considerable exposure to the open air.