Bartholomew Dowling Quote

We meet neath the sounding rafter,
And the walls around are bare;
As they shout back our peals of laughter
It seems that the dead are there.
Ho! stand to your glasses steady!
'T is all we have left to prize.
A cup to the dead already,—
Hurrah for the next that dies!

The Revel: Time of the Famine and Plague in India, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919); alternately attributed to Alfred Domett.