In the dry desert of a thousand lines,
Or lengthened thought that gleams through many a page,
Has sanctified whole poems for an age.
Horace paints the University don as he had seen him emerging from his studious seclusion to walk the streets of Athens, absent, meditative, moving the passers-by to laughter (Ep. II, ii, 81). Pope carries him to Oxford:
The man, who, stretched in Isis' calm retreat,
To books and study gives seven years complete;
See, strowed with learned dust, his nightcap on,
He walks, an object new beneath the sun.
The boys flock round him, and the people stare;
So stiff, so mute! some statue you would swear,