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.

IV

    Curst be the wretch! nay, doubly curst! 
      (If it may lawful be
    To curse our greatest enemy,)
  Who learn’d himself that heresy first,
    (Which since has seized on all the rest,)
That knowledge forfeits all humanity;
Taught us, like Spaniards, to be proud and poor,
  And fling our scraps before our door! 
Thrice happy you have ’scaped this general pest;
Those mighty epithets, learned, good, and great,
Which we ne’er join’d before, but in romances meet,
We find in you at last united grown. 
      You cannot be compared to one: 
    I must, like him that painted Venus’ face,
    Borrow from every one a grace;
Virgil and Epicurus will not do,
      Their courting a retreat like you,
Unless I put in Caesar’s learning too: 
    Your happy frame at once controls
    This great triumvirate of souls.

V