In this way our Hero got safely to college,
Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge;
A reading-machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing,
Appeared in a gown, with black waistcoat of satin,
To spout such a Gothic oration in Latin
That Tully could never have made out a word in it
(Though himself was the model the author preferred in it),
And grasping the parchment which gave him in fee 170
All the mystic and-so-forths contained in A.B.,
He was launched (life is always compared to a sea)
With just enough learning, and skill for the using it,
To prove he’d a brain, by forever confusing it. 
So worthy St. Benedict, piously burning
With the holiest zeal against secular learning,
Nesciensque scienter, as writers express it,
Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit.

’Twould be endless to tell you the things that he knew,
Each a separate fact, undeniably true, 180
But with him or each other they’d nothing to do;
No power of combining, arranging, discerning,
Digested the masses he learned into learning;
There was one thing in life he had practical knowledge for
(And this, you will think, he need scarce go to college for),—­
Not a deed would he do, nor a word would he utter,
Till he’d weighed its relations to plain bread and butter. 
When he left Alma Mater, he practised his wits
In compiling the journals’ historical bits,—­
Of shops broken open, men falling in fits, 190
Great fortunes in England bequeathed to poor printers,
And cold spells, the coldest for many past winters,—­
Then, rising by industry, knack, and address,
Got notices up for an unbiased press,
With a mind so well poised, it seemed equally made for
Applause or abuse, just which chanced to be paid for: 
From this point his progress was rapid and sure,
To the post of a regular heavy reviewer.

And here I must say he wrote excellent articles
On Hebraical points, or the force of Greek particles; 200
They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for,
And nobody read that which nobody cared for;
If any old book reached a fiftieth edition,
He could fill forty pages with safe erudition: 
He could gauge the old books by the old set of rules,
And his very old nothings pleased very old fools;
But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart,
And you put him at sea without compass or chart,—­
His blunders aspired to the rank of an art;
For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him, 210
Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him,
So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,
Carving new forms of truth out of Nature’s old granite,
New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier’s planet,
Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create
In the soul of their critic the measure and weight,