C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Robert Hinckley Messinger (1811–1874)
Give Me the Old
O
Ay, give the slippery juice
That drippeth from the grape thrown loose
Within the tun;
Plucked from beneath the cliff
Of sunny-sided Teneriffe,
And ripened ’neath the blink
Of India’s sun!
Peat whisky hot,
Tempered with well-boiled water!
These make the long night shorter:
Forgetting not
Good stout old English porter.
Ay, bring the hillside beech
From where the owlets meet and screech,
And ravens croak;
The crackling pine, and cedar sweet:
Bring too a clump of fragrant peat,
Dug ’neath the fern;
The knotted oak,
A fagot too, perhap,
Whose bright flame dancing, winking,
Shall light us at our drinking;
While the oozing sap
Shall make sweet music to our thinking.
Ay, bring those nodes of wit,
The brazen-clasped, the vellum-writ.
Time-honored tomes!
The same my sire scanned before,
The same my grandsire thumbed o’er,
The same his sire from college bore,—
The well-earned meed
Of Oxford’s domes:
Old Homer blind,
Old Horace, rake Anacreon, by
Old Tully, Plautus, Terence, lie;
Mort Arthur’s olden minstrelsie,
Quaint Burton, quainter Spenser, ay!
And Gervase Markham’s venerie:
Nor leave behind
The Holye Book by which we live and die.
Ay, bring those chosen few,
The wise, the courtly, and the true,
So rarely found:
Him for my wine, him for my stud.
Him for my easel, distich, bud
In mountain walk!
Bring Walter good,
With soulful Fred, and learned Will:
And thee, my alter ego (dearer still
For every mood).