The Antiquities of College

Like the Frenchmen who wandered south-east in the Spring

and come through the verdure to mouldering Rome

Beforehand prepared by a Latin sequence of poems

Are, arrived, fallen deep in the dusts of the thing

And consider of Earth, and its splendour

How marble comes often apart

As Time with her cronies depart

So too how do men to their essential powder.

Like these when into the Bookstore

the First Year, before his first class

enticed by a wood-cut or antique looking cover

Finds when he gives the money over

And to his learning (thinks he) comes at last

The whole of his hours to bore, bore bore...