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.