“One ounce does all disorders cure.
With two your troubles will be fewer,
Three to the bones more vigor give,
With four forever you will live
As young as on your day of birth,
A true immortal on the earth.”

However hyperbolical this testimony may be considered, it at least serves to show the high estimation in which the plant was held in China.

The first literary eulogist to espouse the cause of the new drink in Europe was Edmund Waller, reciting how he became first induced to taste it. In a poem containing several references to the leaf occurs the following pregnant allusion to tea:—

“The muses friend doth our fancy aid,
Repress these vapors which the head invade,
Keeping that palace of the soul serene.”

That Queen Anne ranked among its votaries is manifest from Pope’s celebrated couplet:—

“Though great Anna, whom the realms obey,
Doth sometimes counsel take and—sometimes Tea.”

Johnson did not make verses in its honor, but he has drawn his own portrait as “a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who for twenty years diluted his meals with an infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle had scarcely time to cool, who with tea amused the evening, with tea solaced the night, and with tea welcomed the morning.” While Brady, in his well-known metrical version of the psalms, thus illustrates its advantages:—

“Over our tea conversations we employ,
Where with delight instructions we enjoy,
Quaffing without waste of time or wealth
The soverign drink of pleasure and of health.”

Cooper’s praise of the beverage has been sadly hackneyed, nevertheless, as the Laureate of the tea table, his lines are worthy of reproduction here:—

“While the bubbling and loud hissing urn
Throws up a steaming column, and the cup
That cheers, but not inebriates, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.”

That Coleridge, in his younger days, must have liked tea is inferred from the following stanza:—

“Though all unknown to Greek and Roman song,
The paler Hyson and the dark Souchong,
Which Kieu-lung, imperial poet praised
So high that cent, per cent. its price was raised.”

Gray eulogizing it:—

“Through all the room
From flowing tea exhales a fragrant fume.”

Byron, in his latter years, became an enthusiast on the use of tea, averring that he “Must have recourse to black Bohea,” still later pronouncing Green tea to be the “Chinese nymph of tears.” And in addition to the praises sung to it by English-speaking poets and essayists, its virtues have also been sounded by Herricken and Francius in Greek verse, by Pecklin, in Latin epigraphs, by Pierre Pettit, in a poem of five hundred lines, as well as by a German versifier, who celebrated, in a fashion of his own, “The burial and happy resurrection of tea.” In opposition to the “country parson,” who calls tea “a nerveless and vaporous liquid,” and Balzac, who describes it as an “insipid and depressing beverage,” the author of “Eothen” records his testimony to “the cheering, soothing influence of the steaming cup that Orientals and Europeans alike enjoy.”