Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry.
Volume I. Of Home: of Friendship. 1904. | | | | Poems of Friendship | | A Winter Wish | | Robert Hinckley Messinger (1811–1874) |
| | | OLD wine to drink!— | |
| Ay, give the slippery juice | |
| That drippeth from the grape thrown loose | |
| Within the tun; | |
| Plucked from beneath the cliff | 5 |
| Of sunny-sided Teneriffe, | |
| And ripened ’neath the blink | |
| Of India’s sun! | |
| Peat whiskey hot, | |
| Tempered with well-boiled water! | 10 |
| These make the long night shorter,— | |
| Forgetting not | |
| Good stout old English porter. | |
| |
| Old wood to burn!— | |
| Ay, bring the hillside beech | 15 |
| 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; | 20 |
| The knotted oak, | |
| A fagot too, perhaps, | |
| Whose bright flame, dancing, winking, | |
| Shall light us at our drinking; | |
| While the oozing sap | 25 |
| Shall make sweet music to our thinking. | |
| |
| Old books to read!— | |
| Ay, bring those nodes of wit, | |
| The brazen-clasped, the vellum writ, | |
| Time-honored tomes! | 30 |
| The same my sire scanned before, | |
| The same my grandsire thumbèd o’er, | |
| The same his sire from college bore, | |
| The well-earned meed | |
| Of Oxford’s domes; | 35 |
| Old Homer blind, | |
| Old Horace, rake Anacreon, by | |
| Old Tully, Plautus, Terence lie; | |
| Mort Arthur’s olden minstrelsie, | |
| Quaint Burton, quainter Spenser, ay! | 40 |
| And Gervase Markham’s venerie,— | |
| Nor leave behind | |
| The Holy Book by which we live and die. | |
| |
| Old friends to talk!— | |
| Ay, bring those chosen few, | 45 |
| 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! | 50 |
| Bring WALTER good: | |
| With soulful FRED; and learned WILL, | |
| And thee, my alter ego (dearer still | |
| For every mood). | |
| These add a bouquet to my wine! | 55 |
| These add a sparkle to the pine! | |
| If these I tine | |
| Can books, or fire or wine be good? | | | | |
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