O dear! what a pity they ever should lose it! For they are the gentry that know how to use it; So grand and so graceful, such manners, such dinners, But yet, after all, it is we are the winners. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money. Thus I sat at my table _en grand seigneur_, And when I had done threw a crust to the poor; Not only the pleasure, one’s self, of good eating, But also the pleasure of now and then treating. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money. They may talk as they please about what they call pelf, And how one ought never to think of one’s self, And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking— My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! How pleasant it is to have money. (Written in Venice, but for all parts true, ’Twas not a crust I gave him, but a sou.) A gondola here, and a gondola there, ’Tis the pleasantest fashion of taking the air. To right and to left; stop, turn, and go yonder, And let us repeat, o’er the tide as we wander, How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! How pleasant it is to have money. Come, leave your Gothic, worn-out story, San Giorgio and the Redentore; I from no building, gay or solemn, Can spare the shapely Grecian column. ’Tis not, these centuries four, for nought Our European world of thought Hath made familiar to its home The classic mind of Greece and Rome; In all new work that would look forth To more than antiquarian worth, Palladio’s pediments and bases, Or something such, will find their places; Maturer optics don’t delight In childish dim religious light, In evanescent vague effects That shirk, not face, one’s intellects; They love not fancies just betrayed, And artful tricks of light and shade, But pure form nakedly displayed, And all things absolutely made. The Doge’s palace though, from hence, In spite of doctrinaire pretence, The tide now level with the quay, Is certainly a thing to see. We’ll turn to the Rialto soon; One’s told to see it by the moon. A gondola here, and a gondola there, ’Tis the pleasantest fashion of taking the air. To right and to left; stop, turn, and go yonder, And let us reflect, o’er the flood as we wander, How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! How pleasant it is to have money. _Di._ How light we go, how soft we skim, And all in moonlight seem to swim! The south side rises o’er our bark, A wall impenetrably dark; The north is seen profusely bright; The water, is it shade or light? Say, gentle moon, which conquers now The flood, those massy hulls, or thou? (How light we go, how softly! Ah, Where life but as the gondola!)