Thro' many an hour of summer suns, By many pleasant ways, Like Hezekiah's, backward runs The shadow of my days: I kiss the lips I once have kiss'd; My college friendships glimmer. I grow in worth and wit and sense, Unboding critic pen, Or that eternal want of pence, Which vexes public men, Who hold their hands to all, and cry For that which all deny them Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry, And all the world go by them. Ah yet, though all the world forsake, Though fortune clip my wings, I will not cramp my heart, nor take Half-views of men and things. Let Whig and Tory stir their blood; But for some true result of good All parties work together. Let there be thistles, there are grapes; If old things, there are new; Ten thousand broken lights and shapes, Let raffs be rife in prose and rhyme, We lack not rhymes and reasons, As on this whirligig of Time We circle with the seasons. This earth is rich in man and maid ; With fair horizons bound: This whole wide earth, of light and shade, Comes out, a perfect round. High over roaring Temple bar, And, set in Heaven's third story, I look at all things as they are, But thro' a kind of glory. * Head-waiter, honour'd by the guest Half-mused, or reeling-ripe, The pint, you brought me, was the best But though the port surpasses praise, Is there some magic in the place? For since I came to live and learn, No pint of white or red Had ever half the power to turn This wheel within my head, Which bears a season'd brain about, Unsubject to confusion, Though soak'd and saturate, out and out, Thro' every convolution. For I am of a numerous house, With many kinsmen gay, Where long and largely we carouse As who shall say me nay: Each month, a birth-day coming on, We drink defying trouble, Or sometimes two would meet in one, And then we drank it double; Whether the vintage, yet unkept, Or, elbow-deep in sawdust, slept, As old as Waterloo; Or stow'd (when classic Canning died) The gloom of ten Decembers. The Muse, the jolly Muse, it is! She answer'd to my call, She changes with that mood or this, Is all-in-all to all: She lit the spark within my throat, To make my blood run quicker, Used all her fiery will, and smote Her life into the liquor. And hence this halo lives about The waiter's hands, that reach To each his perfect pint of stout, He looks not like the common breed I think he came, like Ganymede, The Cock was of a larger egg Stept forward on a firmer leg, And cramm'd a plumper crop; Upon an ampler dunghill trod, Sipt wine from silver, praising God, A private life was all his joy, A something-pottle-bodied boy, That-knuckled at the taw: |