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.