'Tis you who must this land subdue,
The mighty conquest's left for you,
The conquest and discovery too:
Search out this Utopian ground,
Virtue's Terra Incognita,
Where none ever led the way,
Nor ever since but in descriptions found;
Like the philosopher's stone,
With rules to search it, yet obtain'd by none.
II
We have too long been led astray;
Too long have our misguided souls been taught
With rules from musty morals brought,
'Tis you must put us in the way;
Let us (for shame!) no more be fed
With antique relics of the dead,
The gleanings of philosophy;
Philosophy, the lumber of the schools,
The roguery of alchymy;
And we, the bubbled fools,
Spend all our present life, in hopes of golden rules.
III
But what does our proud ignorance Learning call?
We oddly Plato's paradox make good,
Our knowledge is but mere remembrance all;
Remembrance is our treasure and our food;
Nature's fair table-book, our tender souls,
We scrawl all o'er with old and empty rules,
Stale memorandums of the schools:
For learning's mighty treasures look
Into that deep grave, a book;
Think that she there does all her treasures hide,
And that her troubled ghost still haunts there since she died;
Confine her walks to colleges and schools;
Her priests, her train, and followers, show
As if they all were spectres too!
They purchase knowledge at th'expense
Of common breeding, common sense,
And grow at once scholars and fools;
Affect ill-manner'd pedantry,
Rudeness, ill-nature, incivility,
And, sick with dregs and knowledge grown,
Which greedily they swallow down,
Still cast it up, and nauseate company.
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