Chapter CXXXIV

Nay let your flight, Dædalean, touch far shores,
The utmost horizon where discovery tends!
Let Riches lavish their luxuriant stores,
Till Poverty gapes, wanting her wonted friends;
Let Rule, accomplished by adjustment’s mean,
Tune his mild precepts to benevolence;
Let knowledge thirst, and universal seem,
Say what, say wherefore, whither, and say whence;
Let ignorance crown with pride presumption’s vaunt,
And fruitless pages garner stores of praise;
Let social systems, smoothly-gliding, haunt
The wheels of state, whose barter smooths their ways:
Yet riches are life’s condiment, not life;
Peace is not love, but absence from the strife.