Learn temperance, friends; and hear without disdain 405 The choice of water. Thus the Coan[4] sage Opin’d, and thus the learn’d of every school. What least of foreign principles partakes Is best: The lightest then; what bears the touch Of fire the least, and soonest mounts in air; 410 The most insipid; the most void of smell. Such the rude mountain from his horrid sides Pours down; such waters in the sandy vale For ever boil, alike of winter frosts And summer’s heat secure. The lucid stream, 415 O’er rocks resounding, or for many a mile Hurl’d down the pebbly channel, wholesome yields And mellow draughts; except when winter thaws, And half the mountains melt into the tide. Tho’ thirst were ne’er so resolute, avoid 420 The sordid lake, and all such drowsy floods As fill from Lethe Belgia’s slow canals; (With rest corrupt, with vegetation green; Squalid with generation, and the birth Of little monsters;) till the power of fire 425 Has from profane embraces disengag’d The violated lymph. The virgin stream In boiling wastes its finer soul in air. Nothing like simple element dilutes The food, or gives the chyle so soon to flow. 430 But where the stomach, indolently given, Toys with its duty, animate with wine Th’ insipid stream: Tho’ golden Ceres yields A more voluptuous, a more sprightly draught; Perhaps more active. Wine unmix’d, and all 435 The gluey floods that from the vex’d abyss Of fermentation spring; with spirit fraught, And furious with intoxicating fire; Retard concoction, and preserve unthaw’d Th’ embodied mass. You see what countless years, 450 Embalm’d in fiery quintescence of wine, The puny wonders of the reptile world, The tender rudiments of life, the slim Unrav’lings of minute anatomy, Maintain their texture, and unchang’d remain! 455 We curse not wine: The vile excess we blame; More fruitful, than th’ accumulated board, Of pain and misery. For the subtle draught Faster and surer swells the vital tide; And with more active poison, than the floods 460 Of grosser crudity convey, pervades The far-remote meanders of our frame. Ah! sly deceiver! Branded o’er and o’er, Yet still believ’d! Exulting o’er the wreck Of sober Vows! But the Parnassian maids 465 Another time perhaps shall sing the joys, The fatal charms, the many woes of wine; Perhaps its various tribes, and various powers.