Give Me the Old

Old wine to drink! —
Ay, give the slippery juice,
That drippeth from the grape thrown loose,
Within the tun;
Pluck'd from beneath the cliff
Of sunny-sided Tenerifle,
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 hill-side 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 faggot too, perhap,
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-clasp'd, the vellum writ,
Time-honour'd tomes!
The same my sire scanned before,
The same my grandsire thumbed o'er,
The same his sire from college bore,
The well-earn'd 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.
IV.
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.)