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A HEALTH, unmingled with the reveller’s wine,
To him whose title is indeed divine;
Truth’s sleepless watchman on her midnight tower,
Whose lamp burns brightest when the tempests lower.
Oh, who can tell with what a leaden flight
Drag the long watches of his weary night,
While at his feet the hoarse and blinding gale
Strews the torn wreck and bursts the fragile sail,
When stars have faded, when the wave is dark,
When rocks and sands embrace the foundering bark!
But still he pleads with unavailing cry,
Behold the light, O wanderer, look or die!

A health, fair Themis! Would the enchanted vine
Wreathed its green tendrils round this cup of thine!
If Learning’s radiance fill thy modern court,
Its glorious sunshine streams through Blackstone’s port.

Lawyers are thirsty, and their clients too,
Witness at least, if memory serve me true,
Those old tribunals, famed for dusty suits,
Where men sought justice ere they brushed their boots;
And what can match, to solve a learned doubt,
The warmth within that comes from “cold with-out”?

Health to the art whose glory is to give
The crowning boon that makes it life to live.
Ask not her home;–the rock where nature flings
Her arctic lichen, last of living things;
The gardens, fragrant with the orient’s balm,
From the low jasmine to the star-like palm,
Hail her as mistress o’er the distant waves,
And yield their tribute to her wandering slaves.
Wherever, moistening the ungrateful soil,
The tear of suffering tracks the path of toil,
There, in the anguish of his fevered hours,
Her gracious finger points to healing flowers;
Where the lost felon steals away to die,
Her soft hand waves before his closing eye;
Where hunted misery finds his darkest lair,
The midnight taper shows her kneeling there!
VIRTUE,–the guide that men and nations own;
And LAW,–the bulwark that protects her throne;
And HEALTH,–to all its happiest charm that lends;
These and their servants, man’s untiring friends
Pour the bright lymph that Heaven itself lets fall,
In one fair bumper let us toast them all!