James Russell Lowell, in _The Temptation of Hassan Khaled_, presents the argument of the poet's tempters with charming sympathy: The vine is nature's poet: from his bloom The air goes reeling, typsy with perfume, And when the sun is warm within his blood It mounts and sparkles in a crimson flood, Rich with dumb songs he speaks not, till they find Interpretation in the poet's mind. If wine be evil, song is evil too. His _Bacchic Ode_ is full of the same enthusiasm. Bacchus received his highest honors at the end of the last century from the decadents in England. Swinburne, [Footnote: See _Burns_.] Lionel Johnson,[Footnote: See _Vinum Daemonum_.] Ernest Dowson, [Footnote: See _A Villanelle of the Poet's Road_.] and Arthur Symonds, [Footnote: See _A Sequence to Wine_.] vied with one another in praising inebriety as a lyrical agent. Even the sober Watts-Dunton [Footnote: See _A Toast to Omar Khayyam_.] was drawn into the contest, and warmed to the theme. Poetry about the Mermaid Inn is bound to take this tone. From Keats [Footnote: See _Lines on the Mermaid Inn_.] to Josephine Preston Peabody [Footnote: See _Marlowe_.] writers on the Elizabethan dramatists have dwelt upon their conviviality. This aspect is especially stressed by Alfred Noyes, who imagines himself carried back across the centuries to become the Ganymede of the great poets. All of the group keep him busy. In particular he mentions Jonson: And Ben was there, Humming a song upon the old black settle, "Or leave a kiss within the cup And I'll not ask for wine," But meanwhile, he drank malmsey. [Footnote: _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] Fortunately for the future of American verse, there is another side to the picture. The teetotaler poet is by no means non-existent in the last century. Wordsworth takes pains to refer to himself as "a simple, water-drinking bard," [Footnote: See _The Waggoner_.] and in lines _To the Sons of Burns_ he delivers a very fine prohibition lecture. Tennyson offers us _Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue, a reductio ad absurdum_ of the claims of the bibulous bard. Then, lest the temperance cause lack the support of great names, Longfellow causes the title character of _Michael Angelo_ to inform us that he "loves not wine," while, more recently, E. A. Robinson pictures Shakespeare's inability to effervesce with his comrades, because, Ben Jonson confides to us, Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it, He's wondering what's to pay on his insides. [Footnote: _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_. See also Poe's letter, April 1, 1841, to Snodgrass, on the unfortunate results of his intemperance.]