PHILHELLENIC DRINKING-SONG.
BY B. SIMMONS.
Come let us drink their memory,
Those glorious Greeks of old—
On shore and sea the Famed, the Free,
The Beautiful—the Bold!
The mind or mirth that lights each page,
Or bowl by which we sit,
Is sunfire pilfer'd from their age—
Gems splinter'd from their wit.
Then drink we to their memory,
Those glorious Greeks of yore;
Of great or true, we can but do
What they have done before!
We've had with THE GREAT KING to cope—
What if the scene he saw—
The modern Xerxes—from the slope
Of crimson Quatre-bras,
Was but the fruit we early won
From tales of Grecian fields
Such as the swords of Marathon
Carved on the Median shields
Oh, honour to those chainless Greeks,
We drink them one and all,
Who block'd that day Oppression's way
As with a brazen wall!
Theirs was the marble land where, woo'd
By love-born Taste, the Gods
Themselves the life of stone endured
In more divine abodes
Than blest their own Olympus bright;
Then in supreme repose,
Afar star glittering, high and white
Athenè's shrine arose.
So the days of Pericles
The votive goblet fill—
In fane or mart we but distort
His grand achievements still!
Fill to their Matrons' memory—
The Fair who knew no fear—
But gave the hero's shield to be
His bulwark or his bier.[[3]]
We boast their dauntless blood——it fills
That lion-woman's veins,
Whose praise shall perish when thy hills,
JELLALABAD, are plains!
That LADY'S health! who doubts she heard
Of Greece, and loved to hear?
The wheat, two thousand years interr'd,
Will still its harvest bear.[[4]]
The lore of Greece—the book still bright
With Plato's precious thought—
The Theban's harp—the judging-right
Stagyra's sophist taught—
Bard, Critic, Moralist to-day
Can but their spirit speak,
The self-same thoughts transfused. Away,
We are not Gael but Greek.
Then drink, and dream the red grape weeps
Those dead but deathless lords,
Whose influence in our bosom sleeps,
Like music in the chords.
Yet 'tis not in the chiming hour
Of goblets, after all,
That thoughts of old Hellenic Power
Upon the heart should fall.
Go home—and ponder o'er the hoard
When night makes silent earth:
The Gods the Roman most adored,
He worshipp'd at the hearth.
Then, drink and swear by Greece, that there
Though Rhenish Huns may hive,
In Britain we the liberty
She loved will keep alive.
CHORUS
And thus we drink their memory
Those glorious Greeks of old,
On shore and sea the Famed and Free—
The Beautiful—the Bold!
"Return with it or upon it" was the well-known injunction of a Greek mother, as she handed her son his shield previous to the fight.
The mummy-wheat.