Each quicksand safe to build a fame on;
Believe that prudence snug excels
Youth’s gross of verdant spectacles,
Through which earth’s withered stubble seen
Looks autumn-proof as painted green,—­ 70
I side with Moses ’gainst the masses,
Take you the drudge, give me the glasses! 
And, for your talents shaped with practice,
Convince me first that such the fact is;
Let whoso likes be beat, poor fool,
On life’s hard stithy to a tool,
Be whoso will a ploughshare made,
Let me remain a jolly blade!

What’s Knowledge, with her stocks and lands,
To gay Conjecture’s yellow strands? 80
What’s watching her slow flock’s increase
To ventures for the golden fleece? 
What her deep ships, safe under lee,
To youth’s light craft, that drinks the sea,
For Flying Islands making sail,
And failing where ’tis gain to fail? 
Ah me!  Experience (so we’re told),
Time’s crucible, turns lead to gold;
Yet what’s experience won but dross,
Cloud-gold transmuted to our loss? 90
What but base coin the best event
To the untried experiment!

’Twas an old couple, says the poet,
That lodged the gods and did not know it;
Youth sees and knows them as they were
Before Olympus’ top was bare;
From Swampscot’s flats his eye divine
Sees Venus rocking on the brine,
With lucent limbs, that somehow scatter a
Charm that turns Doll to Cleopatra; 100
Bacchus (that now is scarce induced
To give Eld’s lagging blood a boost),
With cymbals’ clang and pards to draw him,
Divine as Ariadne saw him,
Storms through Youth’s pulse with all his train
And wins new Indies in his brain;
Apollo (with the old a trope,
A sort of finer Mister Pope),
Apollo—­but the Muse forbids: 
At his approach cast down thy lids, 110
And think it joy enough to hear
Far off his arrows singing clear;
He knows enough who silent knows
The quiver chiming as he goes;
He tells too much who e’er betrays
The shining Archer’s secret ways.

Dear Friend, you’re right and I am wrong;
My quibbles are not worth a song,
And I sophistically tease
My fancy sad to tricks like these. 120
I could not cheat you if I would;
You know me and my jesting mood,
Mere surface-foam, for pride concealing
The purpose of my deeper feeling. 
I have not spilt one drop of joy
Poured in the senses of the boy,
Nor Nature fails my walks to bless
With all her golden inwardness;
And as blind nestlings, unafraid,
Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade 130
By which their downy dream is stirred,
Taking it for the mother-bird,
So, when God’s shadow, which is light,
Unheralded, by day or night,
My wakening instincts falls across,
Silent as sunbeams over moss,
In my heart’s nest half-conscious things
Stir with a helpless sense of wings,
Lift themselves up, and tremble long
With premonitions sweet of song. 140