So, when upon a moonshine night,
An ass was drinking at a stream,
A cloud arose, and stopt the light,
By intercepting every beam:
The day of judgment will be soon,
Cries out a sage among the crowd;
An ass has swallow’d up the moon!
The moon lay safe behind the cloud.
Each poor subscriber to the sea
Sinks down at once, and there he lies;
Directors fall as well as they,
Their fall is but a trick to rise.
So fishes, rising from the main,
Can soar with moisten’d wings on
high;
The moisture dried, they sink again,
And dip their fins again to fly.
Undone at play, the female troops
Come here their losses to retrieve;
Ride o’er the waves in spacious hoops,
Like Lapland witches in a sieve.
Thus Venus to the sea descends,
As poets feign; but where’s the
moral?
It shows the Queen of Love intends
To search the deep for pearl and coral.
The sea is richer than the land,
I heard it from my grannam’s mouth,
Which now I clearly understand;
For by the sea she meant the South.
Thus, by directors we are told,
“Pray, gentlemen, believe your eyes;
Our ocean’s cover’d o’er with gold,
Look round, and see how thick it lies:
“We, gentlemen, are your assisters,
We’ll come, and hold you by the
chin.”—
Alas! all is not gold that glisters,
Ten thousand sink by leaping in.
O! would those patriots be so kind,
Here in the deep to wash their hands,
Then, like Pactolus,[2] we should find
The sea indeed had golden sands.
A shilling in the bath you fling,
The silver takes a nobler hue,
By magic virtue in the spring,
And seems a guinea to your view.
But, as a guinea will not pass
At market for a farthing more,
Shown through a multiplying glass,
Than what it always did before:
So cast it in the Southern seas,
Or view it through a jobber’s bill;
Put on what spectacles you please,
Your guinea’s but a guinea still.
One night a fool into a brook
Thus from a hillock looking down,
The golden stars for guineas took,
And silver Cynthia for a crown.
The point he could no longer doubt;
He ran, he leapt into the flood;
There sprawl’d a while, and scarce got out,
All cover’d o’er with slime
and mud.
“Upon the water cast thy bread,
And after many days thou’lt find
it;"[3]
But gold, upon this ocean spread,
Shall sink, and leave no mark behind it:
There is a gulf, where thousands fell,
Here all the bold adventurers came,
A narrow sound, though deep as Hell—
’Change Alley is the dreadful name.
Nine times a-day it ebbs and flows,
Yet he that on the surface lies,
Without a pilot seldom knows
The time it falls, or when ’twill
rise.