That Coleridge, in his younger days, must have liked tea is inferred from the following stanza:—
“Though all unknown to Greek and Roman song,
The paler Hyson and the dark Souchong,
Which Kieu-lung, imperial poet praised
So high that cent, per cent. its price was raised.”
Gray eulogizing it:—
“Through all the room
From flowing tea exhales a fragrant fume.”
Byron, in his latter years, became an enthusiast on the use of tea, averring that he “Must have recourse to black Bohea,” still later pronouncing Green tea to be the “Chinese nymph of tears.” And in addition to the praises sung to it by English-speaking poets and essayists, its virtues have also been sounded by Herricken and Francius in Greek verse, by Pecklin, in Latin epigraphs, by Pierre Pettit, in a poem of five hundred lines, as well as by a German versifier, who celebrated, in a fashion of his own, “The burial and happy resurrection of tea.” In opposition to the “country parson,” who calls tea “a nerveless and vaporous liquid,” and Balzac, who describes it as an “insipid and depressing beverage,” the author of “Eothen” records his testimony to “the cheering, soothing influence of the steaming cup that Orientals and Europeans alike enjoy.”