-

rain-traversing a fearful series of dark ship's carpenter, "Chips," ironically styled chasms, separated by sharp-crested perpen- "Beauty" on strict lucus à non lucendo prindicular ridges - leaping from precipice above ciples as ugly in temper as in visage. to palm-tree below and then their entrance Bungs, the cooper, a man after a bar-keeper's into the Typee valley, and introduction to own heart; who, when he felt, as he said, King Mehevi, and initiation into Typee man- just about right," was characterized by a ners, and willy-nilly experiences of Typee free lurch in his gait, a queer way of hitchhospitality. Memorable is the portrait-gal- ing up his waistbands, and looking unneceslery of the natives; Mehevi, towering with sarily steady at you when speaking. Bembo. royal dignity above his faithful commons; the harpooner, a dark, moody savage- -none Marnoo, that all-influential Polynesian Apol- of your effeminate barbarians, but a shaggylo, whose tattooing was the best specimen of browed, glaring-eyed, crisp-haired fellow. the fine arts in that region, and whose elo- under whose swart, tattooed skin the muscles quence wielded at will that fierce anthropoph- worked like steel rods. Rope Yarn, or Ropey, agic demos; Marheyo, paternal and warm-the poor distraught land-lubber a forlorn, hearted old savage, a time-stricken giant- stunted, hook-visaged creature, erst a journeyand his wife, Timor, genuine busybody, most man baker in Holborn, with a soft, and undernotable and exacting of housewives, but no done heart, whom a kind word made a fool termagant or shrew for all that; and their ad- of. And, best of all, Doctor Long Ghost, a mirable son, Kory-Kory—his face tattooed six-feet tower of bones, who quotes Virgil, with such a host of pictured birds and fishes, talks of Hobbes of Malmesbury, and repeats that he resembled a pictorial museum of natural poetry by the canto, especially "Hudibras ;" history, or an illuminated copy of Goldsmith's and who sings mellow old songs, in a voice so "Animated Nature" and whose devotion round and racy, the real juice of sound; and to the stranger no time could wither nor cus- who has seen the world from so many angles, tom stale. And poor Fayaway, olive-cheeked the acute of civilization and the obtuse of nymph, with sweet blue eyes of unfathoma-savagedom; and who is as inventive as he is ble depth, a child of nature with easy, un- incurable in the matter of practical jokes. studied graces, breathing from infancy an all effervescent with animal spirits and tricksy atmosphere of perpetual summer- whom, good-humor. Of the Tahiti folks, Captain deserted by the roving Tommo, we are led to Bob is an amusing personage, a corpulent compare (to his prejudice) with Frederika giant, of three-alderman power in gormandizforsaken by Goethe- -an episode in the ma-ing feats, and so are Po-po and his family, ny-sided baron's life which we have not yet come to regard so tolerantly as Mr. Carlyle. "Omoo," the Rover, keeps up the spirit of "Typee" in a new form. Nothing can be livelier than the sketches of ship and ship's company. "Brave Little Jule, plump Little Jule," a very witch at sailing, despite her crazy rigging and rotten bulwarks- blow high, blow low, always ready for the breeze, and making you forget her patched sails and blistered hull when she was dashing the waves from her prow, and prancing, and pawing the Sea- -flying before the wind-rolling now and then, to be sure, but in very playfulness with spars erect, looking right up into the wind's eye, the pride of her crew; albeit they had their misgivings that this playful craft, like some vivacious old mortal all at once sinking into a decline, might, some dark night, spring a leak, and carry them all to the bottom. The captain, or "Miss Guy" essentially a cockney, and no more meant for the sea than a hairdresser. The bluff mate, John Jermin, with his squinting eye, and rakishly-twisted nose, and gray-ringleted bullet head, and generally pugnacious looks, but with a heart as big as a bullock - ob streperous in his cups, and always for having a fight, but loved as a brother by the very men he flogged, for his irresistibly good-natured way of knocking them down.

The

and the irreverently-ridiculed court of Queen
Pomare. It is uncomfortable to be assured
in the preface, that," in every statement con-
nected with missionary operations, a strict
adherence to facts has, of course, been scru-
pulously observed"-and the satirist's rather
flippant air in treating this subject makes his
protestation not unnecessary, that "nothing
but an earnest desire for truth and good has
led him to touch upon it at all."
less, there is mournful emphasis in these reve-
lations of mickonaree progress, and too much
reason to accept the tenor of his remarks as
correct, and to bewail the inapplicability to
modern missionaries in general of Words-
worth's lines

Neverthe

Rich conquest waits them; the tempestuous sea
of Ignorance, that ran so rough and high,
These good men humble by a few bare words,
And calm with awe of God's divinity.

For does not even so unexceptionable a pillar
of orthodoxy as Sir Archibald Alison express
doubt as to the promise of Missions in relation
to any but European ethnology? affirming, in-
deed, that had Christianity been adapted to
man in his rude and primeval state, it would
have been revealed at an earlier period, and

* See "Alison History of Europe" (New Series), vol. i., p. 74.

would have appeared in the age of Moses, not in that of Cæsar; a dogmatic assertion, by the way, highly characteristic of the somewhat peremptory baronet, and not very harmonious, either in letter or spirit, with the broad text on which world-wide missionary enterprise is founded, and for which Sir Archibald must surely have an ethnic gloss of his own private interpretation: TugevderTES μαθητεύσατε παντα τα έθνη.

But to Mr. Melville. And in a new and not improved aspect. Erit Omoo; enter Mardi. And the cry is, Heu! quantum mutatus ab illo

Alas, how changed from him, This vein of Ercles, and this soul of whim!changed enough to threaten an exeunt omnes of his quondam admirers. The first part of "Mardi" is worthy of its antecedents; but too soon we are hurried whither we would not, and subjected to the caprices, velut agri somnia, of one who, of malice aforethought,

Delphinum silvis appingit, fluctibus aprum the last clause signifying that he bores us with his "sea of troubles," and provokes us to take arms against, and (if possible) by opposing, end them. Yet do some prefer his new shade of marine blue, and exult in this his "sea-change into something rich and strange.' And the author of "Nile Notes" defines "Mardi," as a whole, to be unrhymed poetry, rhythmical and measured - the swell of its sentences having a low, lapping cadence, like the dip of the sun-stilled Pacific waves and sometimes the grave music of Bacon's Essays! Thou wert right, O Howadji, to add, "Who but an American could have written them?" Alas, Cis-Atlantic criticism compared them to Foote's "What, no soap? So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber" with the wedding concomitants of the Picninnies and Great Panjandrum and gunpowder-heeled terpsichorics-Foote being, inoreover, preferred to Melville, on the score of superiority in sense, diversion, and brevity. Nevertheless, subsequent productions have proved the author of " Mardi" to plume himself on his craze, and love to have it so. And what will he do in the end thereof?

the author gifted with a scrutinizing gaze,
and a habit of taking notes as well as "prent-
ing" them, which ensures his readers against
absolute common-place. It is true, he more
than once plunges into episodic extravaganzas
- such as the gambling-house frenzy of
Harry Bolton - but these are, in effect, the
dullest of all his moods; and tend to produce,
what surely they are inspired by, blue devils.
Nor is he over chary of introducing the
repulsive notwithstanding his disclaimer,
Such is the fastidiousness of some readers,
that, many times, they must lose the most
striking incidents in a narrative like mine;"*
for not only some, but most readers are too
fastidious to enjoy such scenes as that of the
starving, dying mother and children in a
Liverpool cellar, and that of the dead mariner,
from whose lips durted out, when the light
touched them," threads of greenish fire, like
a forked tongue," till the cadaverous face was
"crawled over by a swarm of worm-like
fames"- -a hideous picture, as deserving of
a letter of remonstrance on aesthetic grounds,
as Mr. Dickens' spontaneous combustion case
(Krook) on physical. Apart from these
exceptions, the experiences of Redburn during
his "first voyage" are singularly free from
excitement, and even incident. We have one
or two "marine views" happily done, though
not in the artist's very happiest style.
picture of a wreck may be referred to -
of a dismantled, water-logged schooner, that
had been drifting about for weeks; her bul-
the bare stanchions, or
warks all but gone
posts, left standing here and there, splitting
in two the waves which broke clear over the
deck-her open main-hatchway yawning
into view every time she rolled in the trough
of the sea, and submerged again, with a
rushing, gurgling sound of many waters; the
relic of a jacket nailed atop of the broken
mainmast, for a signal; and, sud, stern sight
"three

The

that

most strange and most unnaturaldark, green, grassy objects," lashed, and leaning over sideways against the taffrail— slowly swaying with every roll, but otherwise motionless! There is a spirited sketch, too, of the sailor-boy's first ascent to "loose the main-skysail"—not daring to look down, but keeping his eyes glued to the shrouds In tone and taste "Redburn" was an im- panting and breathing hard before he is halfprovement upon "Mardi," but was as deficient way up-reaching the "Jacob's ladder," as the latter was overfraught with romance and at last, to his own amazement, finding and adventure. Whether fiction or fact, this himself hanging on the skysail yard, holding narrative of the first voyage of Welling-on might and main to the mast, and curling borough Redburn,* a New York merchant's his feet round the rigging, as if they were as sailor-boy in a merchant-vessel, is even prosy, bald, and eventless; and would be dull beyond redemption, as a story, were not

son,

* The hero himself is a sort of amalgam of Perceval Keene and Peter Simple. the keenness strangely antedating the simplicity.

another pair of hands; thence gazing at length, mute and awe-stricken, on the dark midnight sea beneath, which looks like a great, black gulf, hemmed in all round by

* "Redburn," vol. ii., ch. 27.
† See G. H Lewes' Two Letters.

66

beetling black cliffs-the ship below, seem- | his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; ing like a long narrow plank in the water and going about corrupting and searing every the boy above, seeming in utter loneliness to heart that beat near him." There is Jack tread the swart night clouds, and every Blunt, the "Irish Cockney," with his round second expecting to find himself falling face like a walrus, and his stumpy figure like falling-falling, as he used to feel when the a porpoise standing on end-full of dreams nightmare was on him. Redburn managed and marine romance-singing songs about his first ascent deftly, and describes it ad- susceptible mermaids and holding fast a mirably. We, indeed, never have been sed- comfortable creed that all sailors are saved, entary dia ruxros on a main sky-sail; but having plenty of squalls here below, but fair are pretty sure, from these presents, that Mr. weather aloft. There is Larry, the whaleMelville has. Equally sure, in our own case, man, or "blubber-boiler," ever extolling the are we that, had we attained that giddy emi- delights of the free and easy Indian Ocean, nence, not only should we have expected to find and deprecating civilized life, or, as he styles ourself falling falling-falling, but would it, "snivelization," which has spiled him have found ourself, or been found, fallen; which complete, when he might have been a great Redburn was not. Gallant boy-clear- man in Madagasky." There is Dutch Max, headed, light-hearted, fast-handed, nimble- stolid and seemingly respectable, but a sysfooted!-he deserved to reach the top of the tematic bi-(if not poly-)gamist. And there tree, and, having reached, to enjoy the sweet is the black cook, serious, metaphysical, peril, like blossom that hangs on the bough; "and given to talk about original sin" and that in time he did come to enjoy it we sitting all Sunday morning over his boiling find from his record of the wild delirium there pots, and reading grease-spotted good books; is about it the fine rushing of the blood yet tempted to use some bad language occaabout the heart-the glad thrilling and sionally, when the sea dashes into his stove, throbbing of the whole system, to find your-of cold, wet, stormy mornings. And, to conself tossed up at every pitch into the clouds clude, there is the steward, a dandy mulatto, of a stormy sky, and hovering like a judg-yclept Lavender; formerly a barber in Westment angel between heaven and earth; both hands free, with one foot in the rigging, and one somewhere behind you in the air.

Broadway, and still redolent of Cologne water and relics of his stock-in-trade there -a sentimental darky, fond of reading "Charlotte The crew, again, are sketched by a true Temple," and carrying a lock of frizzled hair draughtsman--though one misses the breadth in his waistcoat pocket, which he volunteers and finish of his corresponding descriptions in to show you, with his handkerchief to his "Omoo." There is Captain Riga, all soft- eyes. Mr. Melville is perfectly au fait in sawder ashore, all vinegar and mustard at sea nautical characterization of this kind, and as -a gay Lothario of all inexperienced, sea- thoroughly vapid when essaying revelations going youths, from the capital or the country of English aristocratic life, and rhapsodies who condoles and sympathizes with them about Italian organ-boys, whose broken Engin dock, but whom they will not know again lish resembles a mixture of "the potent wine when he gets out of sight of land, and mounts of Oporto with some delicious syrup," and his cast-off clothes, and adjusts his character to who discourse transcendentally and ravishthe shabbiness of his coat, and holds the per-ingly about their mission, and impel the auplexed lads a little better than his boots, and thor to affirm that a Jew's-harp hath power will no more think of addressing them than of invoking wooden Donald, the figure-head at the ship's bows. There is Jackson a meagre, consumptive, overbearing bullysquinting, broken-nosed, rheumatic weakest body and strongest will on boardone glance of whose squinting eye was as good as a knock-down, for it was the most subtle, deep, infernal-looking eye ever lodged in a human head," and must have once belonged to a wolf, or starved tiger no oculist could ever "turn out a glass eye half so cold, and snaky, and deadly" fit symbol of a man who," though he could not read a word, was spontaneously an atheist, ," and who, during the long night-watches, would enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed, or loved, or worth living for, but everything to be hated, in the wide world in short, 66 а Cain afloat; branded on

the

to awaken all the fairies in our soul, and make them dance there," as on a moonlit sward of violets;" and that there is no humblest thing with music in it, not a fife, not a negrofiddle, that is not to be reverenced as much as the grandest organ that ever rolled its flood-tide of harmony down a cathedral nave! What will Mr. Melville think of our taste, when we own to a delight in the cathedral organ, but also to an incurable irreverence towards street-organ, vagrant fiddle, and perambulatory fife?-against which we have a habit of shutting the window, and retiring to a back room. That we are moved by their concord of sweet sounds, we allow; but it is to a wish that they would "move on," and sometimes to a mental invocation of the police.

No parallel passage is that fine saying of Sir Thomas Browne in " Religio Medici," ii., 9.

Whence, possibly, Mr. Melville will infer, on
Shakspearian authority, that we are meet only
for
Treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
and will demand, quoad our critical taste,
Let no such man be trusted.

seized with spasms, acute and convulsive enough to excite bewilderment in all boholders. When he pleases, Mr. Melville can be so lucid, straightforward, hearty, and unaffected, and displays so unmistakable a shrewdness, and satirical sense of the ridiculous, that it is hard to suppose that he can Next came "White Jacket; or, the World have indited the rhodomontade to which we in a Man-of-War." The hero's soubriquet is allude. Surely the man is a Doppelgangerderived from his-shirt, or "white duck a dual number incarnate (singular though he frock," his only wrap-rascal a garment be, in and out of all conscience): - - surely he patched with old socks and old trouser-legs, is two single gentlemen rolled into one, but bedarned and bequilted till stiff as King retaining their respective idiosyncrasies - the James' cotton-stuffed and dagger-proof doub- one sensible, sagacious, observant, graphic, let provided, moreover, with a great variety and producing admirable matter- the other of pockets, pantries, clothes-presses, and maundering, drivelling, subject to paroxysms, cupboards, and "several unseen recesses cramps, and total collapse, and penning exceedbehind the arras," - insomuch, exclaims the ing many pages of unaccountable bosh." proud, glad owner, " that my jacket, like an So that in tackling every new chapter, one is old castle, was full of winding stairs, and disposed to question it beforehand, "Under mysterious closets, crypts, and cabinets; and which king, Bezonian ?". the sane or the inlike a confidential writing-desk, abounded in sane; the constitutional and legitimate, or the snug little out-of-the-way lairs and hiding- absolute and usurping? Writing of Levia places, for the storage of valuables." The than, he exclaims, "Unconsciously my chiadventures of the adventurous proprietor of rography expands into placard capitals. Give this encyclopaedic toga, this cheap magazine me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius craof a coat, are detailed with that eager vivaci- ter for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms !?? ty, and sometimes that unlicensed extrava- O that his friends had obeyed that summons! gance, which are characteristic of the scribe. They might have saved society from a huge Some of the sea-pictures are worthy of his dose of hyperbolical slang, maudlin sentimenthighest mood when a fine imagination over- alism, and tragi-comic bubble and squeak. rides and represses the chaos of a wanton fancy. Give him to describe a storm on the wide waters the gallant ship laboring for life and against hope the gigantic masts snapping almost under the strain of the top-sails the ship's bell dismally tolling, and this at murk midnight—the rampant billows curling their crests in triumph-the gale flattening the mariners against the rigging as they toil upwards, while a hurricane of slanting sleet and hail pelts them in savage wrath; and he will thrill us quiet landsmen who dwell at home

at ease.

man.

-

Re

His Yankeeisms are plentiful as blackberries. "I am tormented," quoth he, "with an everlasting itch for things remote." mote, too frequently, from good taste, good manners, and good sense. We need not pause at such expressions as looking a sort of diabolically funny;" "beefsteaks done rare;" "a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity;" bidding adieu to circumspect life, to exist only in a delirious throb." But why wax fast and furious in a ... In thousand such paragraphs as these? landlessness alone resides the highest truth, indefinite as the Almighty

Take

For so successful a trader in "marine stores" as Mr. Melville, "The Whale" seemed heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee a speculation every way big with promise. grimly, demi-god! Up from the spray of thy From such a master of his harpoon might ocean-perishing-straight up, leaps thy have been expected a prodigious hit. There apotheosis!". "Thou [scil. Spirit of Equalwas about blubber and spermaceti something ity] great God! who didst not refuse to the unctuously suggestive, with him for whale- swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic And his three volumes entitled "The pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly Whale" undoubtedly contain much vigorous hammered leaves of finest gold the stumped description, much wild power, many striking and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou details. But the effect is distressingly marred who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the throughout by an extravagant treatment of pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a warthe subject. The style is maniacal - mad as horse; who didst thunder him higher than a "If such a furious trope may a March hare mowing, gibbering, scream- throne !" ing, like an incurable Bedlamite; reckless of stand, his [Captain Ahab's] special lunacy keeper or strait-waistcoat. Now it vaults on stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and stilts, and performs Bombastes Furioso with turned all its concentrated cannon upon its. then it was, that contortions of figure, and straining strides, own mad mark and swashbuckler fustian, far beyond Pistol in his torn body and gashed soul bled into one that Ancient's happiest mood. Now it is another; and so interfusing made him mad.?”

"And the miser-merman, Wisdom, re- well of them, say nothing." He will pardon vealed [to a diving negro] his hoarded heaps; us for including in this somewhat arbitrary' and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile classification of forms of beauty and forms of eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-faith, his own last, and worst production, omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the Pierre; or, the Ambiguities.' firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad."

O author of " Typee" and "Omoo," we admire so cordially the proven capacity of your pen, that we entreat you to doff the nonnatural sense 99 of your late lucubrations to put off your worser self-and to do your better, real self, that justice which its" potentiality" deserves.

From the Critic.

FRENCH LITERATURE.

IN a late number of his Memoirs, which still appear from time to time in the Presse, Dumas gives the following curious scene, which is also referred to by Louis Blanc :

On the 29th of July, at five minutes past midday, a window at the corner of the Rue St. Flor entine was opened gently. Gently, however, as it was opened, a shrill and broken voice cried out: "M. Keiser, M. Keiser, what are you "I am looking into the street, doing?" prince. "M. Keiser, you will bring the danger of that, prince. The troops are beating a "There is no people to pillage my house." retreat; and the people only think of following them." "Is that really so, the man who had been addressed by the title of prince arose, and, limping a few steps towards the pendule, said, in a firm and even solemn voice: "M. Keiser, you may make a note upon your tablets that, on the 29th of July, at five minutes past twelve in the day, the elder branch of the Bourbons ceased to reign in

M. Keiser?" Then

The story itself is a strange, wild, furibund thing about Captain Ahab's row of revenge against one Moby Dick. And who is Moby Dick? A fellow of a whale, who has made free with the captain's leg; so that the captain now stumps on ivory, and goes circumnavigating the globe in quest of the old offender, and raves by the hour in a lingo borrowed from Rabelais, Carlyle, Emerson, news papers trandscendental and transatlantic, and the magnificent proems of our Christmas pantomimes. Captain Ahab is introduced with prodigious efforts at preparation; and there is really no lack of rude power and character about his presentment-spoiled, however, by the Cambyses' vein in which he dissipates his vigor. His portrait is striking -looking "like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted, aged robustness”. -a man with a brow gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm thing from its place. Ever since his fell encounter with Moby Dick, this impassioned veteran has cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, frantically identifying with him not only all his bodily woes, but all his feelings of exasperation - so that the White Whale swims before him " as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till Apropos of Talleyrand, Dumas relates that they are left living on with half a heart and he was aware of Napoleon's intention of arresthalf a lung. "The amiable cannibal Quecqueg ing the Duc d'Enghein ten days before it was Occasions some stirring and some humorous carried into execution, and that he sent a messcenes, and is probably the most reasonable senger with instructions to ride post-haste and cultivated creature of the ship's company. and warn the duke of his danger. On the Starbuck and Stubb are both tiresome, in road, the courier's horse fell down, and the different ways. The book is rich with facts man unfortunately broke a leg, upon which, connected with the natural history of the not liking to entrust the message to any one whale, and the whole art and process of else, he wrote to Talleyrand for further inwhaling; and with spirited descriptions of structions. Meantime, the fatal order had that process, which betray an intense straining been given, and when Talleyrand received the at effect. The climax of the three days' chase news of the accident which had happened to after Moby Dick is highly wrought and sternly his messenger he also received intelligence of exciting; but the catastrophe, in its whirl of the duke's arrest. M. Dumas asserts that waters and fancies, resembles one of Turner's the Prince de Condé and Louis XVIII. were later nebulous transgressions in gamboge. aware of this fact; and hence the pardon acSpeaking of the passengers on board Red-corded to the republican and Bonapartist burn's ship Highlander, Mr. Melville signifi- heresies of Talleyrand. cantly and curtly observes," As for the ladies, I have nothing to say concerning them; for ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak

France."

This old man, who in a prophetic tone announced the fall of Charles X., was de Bénévent, and formerly Bishop of Autun. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, Prince

In a feuilleton of the Patrie, M. J. A. Barbier gives the following account of Literature among the Arabs: