"God Lyæus, ever young,
Ever honoured, ever sung,
Stained with blood of lusty grapes;
In a thousand antic shapes
Dance upon the maze's brim,
In the crimson liquor swim;
From thy plenteous hand divine
Let a river run with wine;
God of youth, let this day here
Enter neither care nor fear."
Or we may follow where Shakespeare leads, and sing unhesitatingly with him:—
"Come, thou monarch of the vine,
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!
In thy vats our cares be drowned,
With thy grapes our hairs be crowned,
Cup us, till the world go round—
Cup us, till the world go round."
There is only one drinking-song—a seventeenth-century drinking-song, too—with which I find it difficult to sympathize, and that is the well-known and often-quoted verse of Cowley's, beginning,—
"The thirsty earth drinks up the rain,
And thirsts and gapes for drink again."
Its strained and borrowed conceits which have lost all charm in the borrowing, are not in accordance with anything so natural and simple
