Template:Dsh a lot of learning
Triago: “A little learning is a dangerous thing” —
Nuncle: Not half so dangerous as a lot.
Triago: ’Tis by a Pope, you know.
Nuncle: Not the one in Rome.
Hast thee drunk the waters of the Pierian spring:
Whose hypoxic waters suffocate the brain,
Till no shafts of light can bring thee round again?
Thy mealy conjecture comports a grain of truth
As pure and true and yet no more roundly causative
Than the flappèd wings of a Latin papillon
Which work upon a brewing Filipino typhoon.
Triago: Yet am I here caught, a spider’s prey
Wrestling ’gainst the sticky silk
And by mine own dim efforts
Binding e’er further to my criminous fate.
In this oubliette of mine own devise
Am I enchain’d. There is no gate.
Queen: Is it our plight? So to suffer fools?
Should Cipolla’s curse beset me round with pains?
Nuncle: He who suffers last suffers least
But suffers not so much from fools as brains.
Queen: Hark: a clammy well. Its temper’d syllogies grow deeper by the minute.
And behold: fair Triago —
Nuncle: Of open mouth and mind, well endowed to drop right in it.
Herculio: is this the abyss you wouldst die in?
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts;
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind
But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;
But those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthened way;
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!</noinclude?