against Fortune, the advice deeply to drain the cheering glass, the carefree wish that
Devil take Posterity
And present people too, lad!
are all in the vein of convivial youth, and might be a translation from the Latin of mediaeval days. With such a beginning, we might assuredly expect a ringing chorus with the glowing bowl for its theme; but instead, we have in the chorus itself the unadulterated note of human fraternity, and the only specific suggestion as to conduct has to do, not with the cheer of wine, but with fraternal cheer in the larger sense. And similarly, in the concluding stanzas, immediately following the adjuration to the devil to take both posterity and the present, an appeal implying the futility of all endeavor, the poet devotes himself to the thought of the value of work. There never was a more curious revelation in a drinking song, of cross currents where tendencies towards the easy and the pleasant, the serious and the arduous, are, in their conjunction, expressed in a manner so revelatory of the inner life of the writer.
[ 62 ]
