ALAS! it was no happy night, And all our friends were gathered there: At length she sought, and touched me quite, With asking, 'Why so sad to-night?' And gloomed the sleepless hours till day. It was unkind - ungenerous, She scarce will yield the morning kiss: Thank Heaven! some pride is left me still! May 11th. Yet others' aid could not refuse; I checked her; I no more could bear, What I have striven to say in song: ΤΟ ΑΝΝΑ, 1. WHEN some pet bird escapes the cage, And wings once more the heavenly plain, We grieve, yet soon our pangs assuage, To know 't is with its mates again. II. So ANNA, since, the will divine To all thy dear ones gives thee free; We'll pay our peace to purchase thine, Since robbing us, enriches thee. It must be! - yes! I feel, I feel June 2d. O! BLOOMING June! thou hast in truth White lily hands, and cheeks of rose; And sky-blue eyes of cloudless youth, And voice with tones of birds that flows. I've been all day upon the wing; I could not rest at home, for thought: And see! the very wealth of spring In my flower-hunting have I caught. And oft arrested have I stood, My pet wood-robin's notes to hear; So ringing in the hollow wood, Though few so fluty and so clear: And streaming from the meadow bush, Bob-Linkum's merry soul would gush: I laid me 'neath a birchen tree, And carved her name with rare design; Then razed it, lest strange eyes might see, And know the foolish work was mine. Look at my game! - azalea blows, The white to smell, the pink to see; Green tulip-flowers, whose chalice shows Like mellow fruit upon the tree: Pale sweet-briar, dog-wood blossoms white, With strange side-saddle flowers; and here, The choicest, dearest to my sight, The first magnolia of the year. O SILLY me! last night I went, Before so frail a gift should fade. I climbed the steps with courage strong, Then fled, and sat me 'neath a tree, To watch the dwelling that contained The charm I could not, dared not see. June 6th. Go! go! sweet faded flower, All withered as thou art; I dreamed that honored thou wouldst lie But now unblest thou must depart; TO BE CONTINUED. TIME'S VISTA. SWEET is it to the soul, as life decays, To mark the cloudless skies of other days; On sadder scenes, and smooths each rougher trace. 'A TIME OF UNEXAMPLED PROSPERITY.' BY THE AUTHOR OF THE SKETCH-BOOK. D. In the course of a voyage from England, I once fell in with a convoy of merchant ships, bound for the West Indies. The weather was uncommonly bland; and the ships vied with each other in spreading sail to catch a light, favoring breeze, until their hulls were almost hidden beneath a cloud of canvass. The breeze went down with the sun, and his last yellow rays shone upon a thousand sails, idly flapping against the masts. I exulted in the beauty of the scene, and augured a prosperous voyage; but the veteran master of the ship shook his head, and pronounced this halcyon calm a 'weather-breeder.' And so it proved. A storm burst forth in the night; the sea roared and raged; and when the day broke, I beheld the late gallant convoy scattered in every direction; some dismasted, others scudding under bare poles, and many firing signals of distress. I have since been occasionally reminded of this scene, by those calm, sunny seasons in the commercial world, which are known by the name of times of unexampled prosperity.' They are the sure weather-breeders of traffic. Every now and then the world is visited by one of these delusive seasons, when the credit system,' as it is called, expands to full luxuriance: every body trusts every body; a bad debt is a thing unheard of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open; and men are tempted to dash forward boldly, from the facility of borrowing. Promissory notes, interchanged between scheming individuals, are liberally discounted at the banks, which become so many mints to coin words into cash; and as the supply of words is inexhaustible, it may readily be supposed what a vast amount of promissory capital is soon in circulation. Every one now talks in thousands; nothing is heard but gigantic operations in trade; great purchases and sales of real property, and immense sums made at every transfer. All, to be sure, as yet exists in promise; but the believer in promises calculates the aggregate as solid capital, and falls back in amazement at the amount of public wealth, the unexampled state of public prosperity!' Now is the time for speculative and dreaming or designing men. They relate their dreams and projects to the ignorant and credulous, dazzle them with golden visions, and set them madding after shadows. The example of one stimulates another; speculation rises on speculation; bubble rises on bubble; every one helps with his breath to swell the windy superstructure, and admires and wonders at the magnitude of the inflation he has contributed to produce. Speculation is the_romance of trade, and casts contempt upon all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment. It elevates the merchant into a kind of knight errant, or rather a commercial Quixotte. The slow but sure gains of snug per centage become despicable in his eyes: no operation' is thought worthy of attention, that does not double or treble the investment. No business is worth following, that does not promise an immediate fortune. As he sits musing over his ledger, with pen behind his ear, he is like La Mancha's hero in his study, dreaming over his books of chivalry. His dusty counting-house fades before his eyes, or changes into a Spanish mine: he gropes after diamonds, or dives after pearls. The subterranean garden of Aladdin is nothing to the realms of wealth that break upon his imagination. Could this delusion always last, the life of a merchant would indeed be a golden dream; but it is as short as it is brilliant. Let but a doubt enter, and the season of unexampled prosperity' is at end. The coinage of words is suddenly curtailed; the promissory capital begins to vanish into smoke; a panic succeeds, and the whole superstructure, built upon credit, and reared by speculation, crumbles to the ground, leaving scarce a wreck behind: 'It is such stuff as dreams are made of.' When a man of business, therefore, hears on every side rumors of fortunes suddenly acquired; when he finds banks liberal, and brokers busy; when he sees adventurers flush of paper capital, and full of scheme and enterprise; when he perceives a greater disposition to buy than to sell; when trade overflows its accustomed channels, and deluges the country; when he hears of new regions of commercial adventure; of distant marts and distant mines, swallowing merchandise and disgorging gold; when he finds joint stock companies of all kinds forming; rail-roads, canals, and locomotive engines, springing up on every side; when idlers suddenly become men of business, and dash into the game of commerce as they would into the hazards of the faro table; when he beholds the streets glittering with new equipages, palaces conjured up by the magic of speculation; tradesmen flushed with sudden success, and vying with each other in ostentatious expense; in a word, when he hears the whole community joining in the theme of unexampled prosperity,' let him look upon the whole as a weather-breeder,' and prepare for the impending storm. The foregoing remarks are intended merely as a prelude to a nar rative I am about to lay before the public, of one of the most memorable instances of the infatuation of gain, to be found in the whole history of commerce. I allude to the famous Mississippi bubble. It is a matter that has passed into a proverb, and become a phrase in every one's mouth, yet of which not one merchant in ten has probably a distinct idea. I have therefore thought that an authentic account of it would be interesting and salutary, at the present moment, when we are suffering under the effects of a severe access of the credit system, and just recovering from one of its ruinous delusions. BEFORE entering into the story of this famous chimera, it is proper to give a few particulars concerning the individual who engendered it. JOHN LAW was born in Edinburgh, in 1671. His father, William Law, was a rich goldsmith, and left his son an estate of considerable value, called Lauriston, situated about four miles from Edinburgh. Goldsmiths, in those days, acted occasionally as bankers, and his father's operations, under this character, may have originally turned the thoughts of the youth to the science of calculation, in which he be came an adept; so that at an early age he excelled in playing at all games of combination. In 1694, he appeared in London, where a handsome person, and an easy and insinuating address, gained him currency in the first circles, and the nick-name of Beau Law.' • The same personal advantages gave him success in the world of gallantry, until he became involved in a quarrel with Beau Wilson, his rival in fashion, whom he killed in a duel, and then fled to France, to avoid prosecution. He returned to Edinburgh in 1700, and remained there several years; during which time he first broached his great credit system, offering to supply the deficiency of coin by the establishment of a bank, which, according to his views, might emit a paper currency equivalent to the whole landed estate of the kingdom. His scheme excited great astonishment in Edinburgh; but, though the government was not sufficiently advanced in financial knowledge to detect the fallacies upon which it was founded, Scottish caution and suspicion served in place of wisdom, and the project was rejected. Law met with no better success with the English parliament; and the fatal affair of the death of Wilson still hanging over him, for which he had never been able to procure a pardon, he again went to France. The financial affairs of France were at this time in a deplorable condition. The wars, the pomp, and profusion, of Louis XIV., and his religious persecutions of whole classes of the most industrious of his subjects, had exhausted his treasury, and overwhelmed the nation with debt. The old monarch clung to his selfish magnificence, and could not be induced to diminish his enormous expenditure; and his minister of finance was driven to his wits' end to devise all kinds of disastrous expedients to keep up the royal state, and to extricate the nation from its embarrassments. |