"Raw fish! Shall I ever forget my sensations when I first saw my island beauty devour one. Oh, heavens! Fayaway, how

could you ever have contracted so vile a habit? However, after the first shock had subsided, the custom grew less odious in my eyes, and I soon accustomed myself to the sight. Let no one imagine, however, that the lovely Fayaway was in the habit of swallowing great vulgar-looking fishes: oh, no; with her beautiful small hand she would clasp a delicate, little, golden-hued love of a fish, and eat it as elegantly and

as innocently as though it were a Naples

biscuit. But alas! it was after all a raw

fish; and all I can say is, that Fayaway ate it in a more lady-like manner than any other girl of the valley.

"When at Rome do as the Romans do, I held to be so good a proverb, that being in Typee I made a point of doing as the Typees did. Thus I ate poee-poee as they did; I walked about in a garb striking for its simplicity; and I reposed on a community of couches; besides doing many other things in conformity with their peculiar habits; but the farthest I ever went in the way of conformity, was on several occasions to regale myself with raw fish. These being remarkably tender, and quite small, the undertaking was not so disagreeable in the main, and after a few trials I positively began to relish them: however, I subjected them to a slight operation with my knife previously to making my repast."

The appearance of the Typee people produced a deep and favorable impression on the mind of Mr. Melville. He considers them models of grace and beauty; the fair come in for a large share of his admiration, and in regard to them he makes some invidious comparisons which we commend to the notice of his country women. He is also highly pleased with the freedom enjoyed by the natives. The Typee government is simple. A chief reigns supreme, and his commands are few and willingly obeyed. There are no rigorous laws, nor trouble

some conventialities to hamper the freedom of either sex; not even the restraints of marriage are felt, although our author did discover that women tattooed in a peculiar manner were considered as wives. Notwithstanding all these captivating the Typeean society seemed to him so charms of savage life; notwithstanding far superior to that which is the growth and creature of civilization and religion, Mr. Melville was in despair and rendered unhappy because he could not escape from this paradisaical valley. He could live without labor and be free from care, but he could not get rid of the idea that some fine morning he would be killed and cooked, after he had attained to that degree of obesity which is requisite in order to figure respectably on such an occasion. And therefore we find him mak

ing his escape at the first opportunity. A small boat coming into the bay from Nukuheva, he made his escape, aided by a friendly feeling on the part of some of the natives. This was not effected without a vigorous opposition on the part of others. Indeed, a fight ensued, and was in full progress on his account when he departed from their shores; and some savage fellows, stung no doubt by his folly and ingratitude at leaving so much happiness, both present and prospective, followed him a long way into the bay with frantic cries and threats of vengeance.

We take it for granted, as Mr. Melville has now reached home, that he is again duly sensible of the great hardships and evils of civilization, and that he will hasten his return to the society he has so cleverly described in these volumes. The charming Fayaway-the simple-hearted trustful maiden whom he left weeping on the lone island shoreno doubt waits his return with tearful eye and besides this allurement, a score of Typeean gourmands are also waiting, in the shade of lofty cocoa-trees, for their noon-day meal. How can Mr. Melville resist such temptations? If he does return, we can only express the hope, in the language of Sydney Smith to a Missionary friend on his departure for New Zealand, that he may not disagree with the stomach of the man that eats him.

THERE are three kinds of readers and critics of poetry, as there are three very different kinds of poets. Of bards indeed minstrels, scalds, sagas, seers, poets, or by whatever name the early ages, with a species of wonder, designated those who seemed conversant with some Presence of which the mass of humanity had little perception-of minstrels and bards the three orders are plainly enough distinct. For the poet is one who reads Nature more clearly than his fellow-men. But Nature-though in the fullest sense, to the clearest eye, she is one-yet lies in two or three departments, so different as to seem entirely disconnected, except to a deep comprehension of the relations of things. The word is usually accepted as embracing only the universe of material things-those objects and influences alone of which our senses take cognizance. This restriction of the meaning is as false, as it is common. The world of the hearts and minds of men-the great community of human passions and affections, with those complicated relations of society which necessarily grow out of them is as truly a part of Nature as is the sphere of all external existences. The Power that “laid the foundations of the heavens," in like manner ordered these, with a yet vaster diversity and with a harmony not less wonderful. Nor yet do these two fields of the objects of contemplation exhaust the domains which Nature must be considered as possessing. For the term, whether by its etymological sense or by force of the just comprehension which it ought to have, embraces whatever Is-of attributes, qualities, influences, effects as well as causes, and immaterial, unexplained, as well as material, evident-out of and apart from the "Great First Cause." In other words, everything that is necessarily by the laws of our being which the Creator ordained a subject of thought to the human mind, exists to human estimation, as a part of the wide field of Nature. If many things are dimly seen, or utterly inexplicable-if possibly higher beings may see them differently from what we do-it is yet nothing to us; for if we

The Poems of Alfred B. Street. Clark & Austin.

cannot get away from them, all men admitting them, more or less to their contemplation and belief, they become to us realities-which is enough for the argument, if it is not the ground of all reasoning on the subject. But how vast a region of the objects of thought, of the influences of the mind, lies entirely apart from the outward physical world, and equally from the sphere of human passions and affections. The conditions of existence-the always unfathomable mysteries of our nature-our capacities and moods of mind, the "thoughts that wander through eternity"-our relations (as men have universally agreed in believing) to Divinity and a spiritual worldthe half recognized elements of inferior creatures-the immense system of absolute truths-the great circle of probabilities almost as persuasive-the shadows that are not shadows, the dreams that all have conspired in dreaming, the imaginings all have been constrained to imagine, lying far off in that thrice-veiled Future, from whose portals no shining feet have come back to us of those whose entrance we have seemed to beholdthese things are in a distinct realm by themselves, and equally with all other qualities and influences that can affect our minds are ordained by Him who “ sees the end from the beginning."

Now as the greatness of Nature consists in her embracing at once all that we have enumerated as lying beneath the on-look of Deity-all entities, that are, aside from the Uncreated-whether material or spiritual, bound together in this great whole by certain ties not the less real and eternal, that they are subtil and unseen-so the greatest of poets is he who not only most deeply reads and feels the physical universe, but who penetrates as it were,and compasses with a quick vision that inhabiting co-extended universe of spiritual life, of intelligent existences without which the former, with its infinitude of sights, sounds and odors, were but a vast dumb pageantry, utterly unintelligible and idle, because having neither use nor interpreter. The fine words indeed which Coleridge

The bland wind shifted to the west,
Where a stripe of brassy light
Glowed like the flame of a furnace,
When the sun had passed from sight;
And, in the fleeting twilight, cold

And colder waxed the air,

Till 'twas felt on the brow like the touch of ice,

As the still night darkened there.

Oh, bitter were the hours! and those
Who, wakeful, marked them pass,
Could hear the snap of table and chair,
And ring of breaking glass;
Without, though the wind was quiet,
Crack, crack, went the maple and oak,
As if some mighty trampling power

Those huge stems downward broke ;
The very wolf, the fierce gaunt wolf,
Though famishing, to his cave
Crept shivering back, nor sought again
The deadly cold to brave.

And morning glowed with a heartless sun
And a heaven of harshest blue,
And an air that pricked and stung the skin,
As if darts invisible flew;

But oh, the sight, the radiant sight,
That broke upon the eye!
Millions of sparkles danced around
Of every varied dye;

The boughs were steel, the roofs were steel,
With icicles hanging down,
Steel gave a helmet to the hill-

To the mountain-top a crown.

The lake, far, far, it stretched, no gem
More pure, more clear and bright;
Solid as iron, and smooth as glass,
It froze in a single night;
When sunk the sun, 'twas a watery waste
With ripples upon its gloss;
When rose the sun, 'twas a polished plain
That a steed might safely cross."

Mr. Street's rhythmic forte, however, as well as his best efforts in description and style, lies in his blank verse, of which the larger part of his volume is composed. He has not, indeed, made himself a master in this most difficult of English measures. He, by no means, knows all its capacities-its pauses, slides, slow and swift movements, and the various other sources of its immense power. He evidently has not used, as he might, the knowledge which he does possess. He is often needlessly awkward, sometimes mistakes abruptness for strength, and seldom sustains himself from the beginning to the end of any piece-a thing more necessary to a favorable impression in blank verse, than it is in rhyme. In short, he has not studied its elements, though where he

seems to have labored the most, he has been the least successful. We must judge, however, not only of a man's capacity, but also what of achievement he has attained to, by the better half of what he has done, not by the worse. The best part of Mr. Street's blank verse will compare favorably, in the movement of its language, with that of any American poet, and, as well, with any English effusions written upon similar subjects. It has not the pomp of motion-stately, but somewhat cumbered-of Thomson's Seasons; nor the measured force, the quiet sustained progress, of Cowper's Task; nor the long, wavelike and majestic advance of Wordsworth's descriptive style. Among writers at home, he has not the easy but guarded dignity, the elegant monotony, the tranquil attention to rules of pausing, balancing, compensation, by which the blank verse of Bryant is always characterized; still less has he adopted the delicate and dainty step-elastic as air, but afraid of treading on stones-with which Willis's Scripture measures float through the mind of the reader. He differs from them all; in fact the best thing about him is, that his style, as well as his thoughts, throughout his writings, are very much his own. In the tone of his blank verse, and in its general construction, he may have borrowed something from all the writers spoken of. He does, indeed, in its apparently careless simplicity of movement, approach the style of Cowper; and in other respects-as, usually, in his forcible, single-hearted English-he is quite like that most purely native of England's rural poets. Still, it is easy to see that he is not Cowper. He is terser, more abrupt at times, and treads in sentences very differently balanced. short, his style, diction, movement of verse, have evidently sprung up within himself. They are native to his mind, as to one familiar with forest-winds, with the courses of clouds, the flow of great rivers, the changing of sunshine and shadows over broad fields, and all those gentle and majestic motions, and solemn sounds, with which nature is able to impress us.

In

In the use of language, more especially in his blank verse, Mr. Street is simple yet rich, and usually very felicitous. This is peculiarly the case in his choice of appellatives, which he selects and applies with an aptness of descriptive beauty not surpassed, if equaled, by any poet among us-certainly by none except Bryant.

its in all his writings no reach or compass of philosophy that goes much beyond eloquently doubting; and the misanthropical tone-that rises throughout, like the constant note of the bittern, at sundown, in desolate places-makes us turn from his pages with a sense of weariness and pain which the dark splendor of his verse can never overcome. Shall, therefore, the sacred diciples of Wordsworth, or those who for many good reasons adore Shelley on the mountain-tops, declare that Byron was no poet? Young, again, had a confined, laborious imagination, too uniformly solemn to be various, with but a dull sense among the passions of men, and a limited susceptibility to the beauty of Nature. He confined himself, almost exclusively, to the shadowy region of poetical metaphysics, treading always-slowly, and like one who find himself walking alone at night in an empty space-along the "void darkness " that separates two states of existence; and the sustained sombreness of power with which he walks there has never been surpassed out of the prophets. Was Young no poet? Will the voluptuous lovers of Moore's graceful fancies shut him out from the circle of inspired men? With nearly equal exclusiveness does Thomson in his Seasons confine himself to the one field of describing Nature. Would Thomson, if he had never written "the Castle of Indolence," be considered no poet? Or can Cowper be denied the name, who in the " The Task" never leaves the same field, except when he relapses into sober moralizing? Or is Crabbe nothing, who confines himself as entirely to his single sphere of the humble vicissitudes of humanity, the passions and affections of lowly life, as ever

We pro

a mechanic did to his trade? test against such partial criticism—such narrowing down of the empire of taste and feeling.

We have made these remarks at such length for an ultimate purpose. We have thought of making, as occasion may offer-for we do not propose any par ticular period for their execution-a series of observations on American Poets; and we wish to show the grounds on which it may not be impossible to give each some credit, without offending the friends of the rest!

We begin with Mr. Alfred B. Streetnot that we consider him the first of our poets, but because he has confined himself with a singular exclusiveness and fidelity to one province alone of all po. etry, and that the most obvious and first to be treated of-material Nature. It is an additional consideration, that Mr. Street's Poems have just been published, in a volume quite satisfactory to typographical eyes. We shall endeavor to do Mr. Street justice-whether in praise or censure-though we regret to feel, that it must be in contradiction to certain venerable ex-cathedra decisions from another quarter.

There is, in Mr. Street's poems, at least, something to take hold of. They are not a dead level of no-qualities. We make choice, first, of a piece by means of which we may unload ourselves as soon as possible of censure; for we think it is right, that one should end, at least, gratuitous remarks on a fellow-being in a good humor. It has been considered, besides, one of his most striking pieces, and contains several of his peculiar characteristics.