50 
NATUEE IN THE NATUEE POETS. 
^' A fingering slave, 
One that would peep and botanize 
Upon his mother's grave " ; 
while the other considers knowledge as 
"... a rude unprofitable mass, 
The mere materials with which wisdom builds." 
{Task bk. vi.) 
Na}'', he seems to go farther, The man with knowledge, hut 
without wisdom, 
" Whatever he discuss — 
"Whether the space between the stars and us, 
Whether he measure earth, compute the sea, 
Weigh sunbeams, carve a fly. or split a flea — 
The solemn trifler, with his boasted skill. 
Toils much, and is a solemn trifler still." 
(Charitij.) 
And again {Task^ bk. iii.) : 
" Some drill and bore 
The solid earth, and from the strata there 
Extract a register, by which we learn 
That He who made it, and revealed its date 
To Moses, was mistaken in its age. 
. . . And thus they speed 
The little wick of life's poor shallow lamp 
In playing tricks with nature, giving laws 
To distant worlds and trifling in their own. . . . 
Defend me therefore, common sense, say I, 
From reveries so airy, from the toil 
Of dropping buckets into empty wells. 
And growing old in drawing nothing up." 
Yet with all this Cowper does not intend to decry the 
pursuits of science. In his "Tirocinium" he exhorts the 
parent to teach his son the wonders of the heavens rather 
than spend too much time on the history, not always edify- 
ing, of heathen gods and goddesses. Thus he makes the 
amende honorable, or rather, shows us what he really in- 
tended by his earlier utterance. 
