HOW many ringing songs there are that celebrate the wine, and other
goods behind the bar, as being wondrous fine! How many choruses exalt
the brown October ale, which puts a fellow’s wits at fault, and lands
him in the jail! A hundred poets wasted ink, and ruined good quill pens,
describing all the joys of drink in gilded boozing kens. But all those
joys are hollow fakes which wisdom can’t indorse; they’re soon converted
into aches and sorrow and remorse. The man who drains the brimming glass
in haunts of light and song, next morning knows that he’s an ass, with
ears twelve inches long. An aching head, a pile of debts, a taste that’s
green and stale, that’s what the merry fellow gets from brown October
ale. Untimely graves and weeping wives and orphans shedding brine; this
sort of thing the world derives from bright and sparkling wine. The
prison cell, the scaffold near; such features may be blamed on wholesome
keg and bottled beer, which made one city famed. Oh, sing of mud or axle
grease, but chant no fairy tale, of that disturber of the peace, the
brown October ale!
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