Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 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

Of sunny-sided Teneriffe,

And ripened ’neath the blink

Of India’s sun!

Peat whiskey hot,

Tempered with well-boiled water!

These make the long night shorter,—

Forgetting not

Good stout old English porter.

Old wood to burn!—

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, perhaps,

Whose bright flame, dancing, winking,

Shall light us at our drinking;

While the oozing sap

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!

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;

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 Holy Book by which we live and die.

Old friends to talk!—

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).

These add a bouquet to my wine!

These add a sparkle to the pine!

If these I tine

Can books, or fire or wine be good?