the neck till they are empty.

Nay, but of that lonely glass in the social solitude of the
tavern,--alone, but not alone, for the glass is sure to bring a
dream to bear it company, and it is a poor dream that cannot
raise a song. And what greater felicity than to be alone in a
tavern with your last new song, just born and yet still a
tingling part of you.

Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have heard it asked,
have we no "Eating Songs?"--for eating is, surely, a fine
pleasure. Many practise it already, and it is becoming more
general every day.

I speak not of the finicking joy of the gourmet, but the joy of
an honest appetite in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing
quantities of fresh simple food,--mere roast lamb, new potatoes,
and peas of living green.

It is, indeed, an absorbing pleasure. It needs all our
attention. You must eat as you kiss, so exacting are the joys of
the mouth,--talking, for example. The quiet eye may be allowed
to participate, and sometimes the ear, where the music is played
upon a violin, and that a Stradivarius. A well-kept lawn, with
six-hundred-years-old cedars and a twenty-feet yew hedge, will
add distinction to the meal. Nor should one ever eat without a
seventeenth-century poet in an old yellow-leaved edition upon the
table, not to be read, of course, any more than the flowers are
to be eaten, but just to make music of association very softly to
our thoughts.