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;
The gas-light wavers dimmer;
And softly, thro' a vinous mist,

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;
There must be stormy weather;

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,
Yet glimpses of the true.

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
That ever came from pipe.

But though the port surpasses praise,
My nerves have dealt with stiffer.

Is there some magic in the place?
Or do my peptics differ?

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,
Had relish fiery-new,

Or, elbow-deep in sawdust, slept,

As old as Waterloo;

Or stow'd (when classic Canning died)
In musty bins and chambers,
Had cast upon its crusty side

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,
His proper chop to each.

He looks not like the common breed
That with the napkin dally;

I think he came, like Ganymede,
From some delightful valley.

The Cock was of a larger egg
Than modern poultry drop,

Stept forward on a firmer leg,

And cramm'd a plumper crop;

Upon an ampler dunghill trod,
Crow'd lustier late and early,

Sipt wine from silver, praising God,
And raked in golden barley.

A private life was all his joy,
Till in a court he saw

A something-pottle-bodied boy,

That-knuckled at the taw: