The History of the Royal Society of London

Come, enter, all that will,
Behold the ripened fruit, come gather now your fill.
Yet still, methinks, we fain would be
Catching at the forbidden tree;
We would be like the Deity,
When truth and falsehood, good and evil, we
Without the senses' aid within ourselves would see;
For 'tis God only who can find
All nature in his mind.

IV.

From words, which are but pictures of the thought,
(Though we our thoughts from them perversely drew)
To things, the mind's right object, he it brought.
Like foolish birds to painted grapes we flew;
He sought and gathered for our use the true;
And when on heaps the chosen bunches lay,
He pressed them wisely the mechanic way,
Till all their juice did in one vessel join,
Ferment into a nourishment divine,
The thirsty soul's refreshing wine.
Who to the life an exact piece would make,
Must not from other's work a copy take;
No, not from Rubens or Van Dyck;
Much less content himself to make it like
The ideas and the images which lie
In his own fancy, or his memory.
No, he before his sight must place
The natural and living face;
The real object must command
Each judgment of his eye, and motion of his hand.

V.

From these and all long errors of the way,
In which our wandering predecessors went,
And like the old Hebrews many years did stray