No More Learning

I looked on them nine several days,
And then I saw that they were bad;
A friend, too, spoke in their dispraise,-- _530
He never read them;--with amaze
I found Sir William Drummond had.

16.
When the book came, the Devil sent
It to P. Verbovale (2), Esquire,
With a brief note of compliment, _535
By that night's Carlisle mail. It went,
And set his soul on fire.

17.
Fire, which ex luce praebens fumum,
Made him beyond the bottom see
Of truth's clear well--when I and you, Ma'am, _540
Go, as we shall do, subter humum,
We may know more than he.

18.
Now Peter ran to seed in soul
Into a walking paradox;
For he was neither part nor whole, _545
Nor good, nor bad--nor knave nor fool;
--Among the woods and rocks

19.
Furious he rode, where late he ran,
Lashing and spurring his tame hobby;
Turned to a formal puritan, _550
A solemn and unsexual man,--
He half believed "White Obi".

20.
This steed in vision he would ride,
High trotting over nine-inch bridges,
With Flibbertigibbet, imp of pride, _555
Mocking and mowing by his side--
A mad-brained goblin for a guide--
Over corn-fields, gates, and hedges.

21.
After these ghastly rides, he came
Home to his heart, and found from thence _560
Much stolen of its accustomed flame;
His thoughts grew weak, drowsy, and lame
Of their intelligence.

22.
To Peter's view, all seemed one hue;
He was no Whig, he was no Tory; _565
No Deist and no Christian he;--
He got so subtle, that to be
Nothing, was all his glory.

23.
One single point in his belief
From his organization sprung, _570
The heart-enrooted faith, the chief
Ear in his doctrines' blighted sheaf,
That 'Happiness is wrong';

24.
So thought Calvin and Dominic;
So think their fierce successors, who _575
Even now would neither stint nor stick
Our flesh from off our bones to pick,
If they might 'do their do. '

25.
His morals thus were undermined:--
The old Peter--the hard, old Potter-- _580
Was born anew within his mind;
He grew dull, harsh, sly, unrefined,
As when he tramped beside the Otter. (1)

26.
In the death hues of agony
Lambently flashing from a fish, _585
Now Peter felt amused to see
Shades like a rainbow's rise and flee,
Mixed with a certain hungry wish(2).

27.
So in his Country's dying face
He looked--and, lovely as she lay, _590
Seeking in vain his last embrace,
Wailing her own abandoned case,
With hardened sneer he turned away:

28.
And coolly to his own soul said;--
'Do you not think that we might make _595
A poem on her when she's dead:--
Or, no--a thought is in my head--
Her shroud for a new sheet I'll take:

29.
'My wife wants one. --Let who will bury
This mangled corpse! And I and you, _600
My dearest Soul, will then make merry,
As the Prince Regent did with Sherry,--'
'Ay--and at last desert me too. '

30.
And so his Soul would not be gay,
But moaned within him; like a fawn _605
Moaning within a cave, it lay
Wounded and wasting, day by day,
Till all its life of life was gone.