lack both strength and style. To be sure Melville's coloring is too violent, but that is not astonishing. At his age, when the first sap of life lends a passionate force to ideas, he must have received emotions, vivid, exaggerated, if you will, from the novelty of the scenes, the singularity of the perils. His style is exuberant; his colors Rubens-like, and his predilection for dramatic effect in bad taste. Nevertheless, there are as many romantic details in the old Spanish doctor, Saaverde de Figueroa, who first described these voluptuous isles. Like all his predecessors, Figueroa, Cook, Bougainville, Melville wrote under the power of an intoxication produced by the prestiges of Nature and the strangeness of customs.

SECTION III.

NEW VOYAGES OF MELVILLE

OF HOW, NOT HAVING BEEN

EATEN, HE THROWS HIMSELF INTO THE REGION OF CHIMERA. SYMBOLS.

The real value of the two books aforesaid consists in the vivacity of their impressions, and the lightness of the pencil. Seduced by his first success, the author tried to write a new and singular book "Mardi, and a Voyage thither." Oppressed by the reputation of inventor which men had given him, he determined to merit it: he strove to exhibit all those treasures of imagination which were attributed to him. Let us see how he succeeded.

In the first place, like a good merchant, not wishing to lose the credit that his first affair in the isle of Tior had procured, he stuck to Polynesia-fault the first. Then he tried to be

absolutely original-fault the second. Is one original at

will?

We must not reproach the Americans with want of originality in the arts; originality is not to be commanded, and comes late; nations and individuals begin by imitation. Originality is a quality of ripe minds, of such as know thoroughly their own depth and extent; childhood is never original. This excessive pretention to novelty has, of course, ended in a mournful mixture of grotesque comedy and fantastic grandeur, to be found in no other book. There is nothing so wretched as pomposity in what is vulgar, common-place in the unintelligible, an accumulation of catastrophes with emphatically slow description. These vagaries, ornaments, graces; this flowery style, so festooned and scolloped, is like the arabesques of certain writing masters, one cannot read the text.

A humoristic book, a voyage without compass upon a limitless sea, is the rarest product of art: Sterne, Jean Paul, and Cervantes-men of genius-have alone succeeded. What study, reflection, toil, knowledge of style, what power of combination and progress of civilization was necessary to create Rabelais, Swift, Cervantes!

Mr. Melville begins with faery, to continue by romantic fiction and then essays symbolical irony. We are not astonished then that Mardi has all the defects of the infant AngloAmerican literature. We observe the curious development of a nationality of the second creation; and we must remember that there are diseases peculiar to growth, and that men and races do not develope themselves by their virtues alone but also by their vices.

Americans, like all people who have not yet a personal literature, see vulgarity in simplicity. Hyperbole is the common vice of a commencing as of a decaying literature. To this is joined the incorrectness consequent upon too rapid

labor. Mr. Melville does not use the English with wise ease like Longfellow, nor with somewhat timid grace like Bryant, another remarkable poet. He breaks vocables, upsets periods, creates unknown adjectives, invents absurd elipses, and composes unusual words, against the laws of the antique AngloGermanic tongue-"unshadow," "tireless," "fadeless," and other such monsters.

Nevertheless, and in despite of an unheard-of style, the sea emotions are admirably given. Sometimes he represents it as a mighty but rebellious courser, conquered by industry, patience and knowledge: at other times as a Herculean Force which plays with man as the wind with a plume.

The first part of Mardi, if we except the incessant effort of the author to be eloquent, ingenious, and original, is charmingly life-like. There is much interest and vigor in the maritime scenes, the pictures of calm and storm, and of the brigantine taken and abandoned. You hope for truthful or

true adventures. Nothing like them. Hardly has the author entered those lagoons, where spring-time is eternal, and the night luminous as the day, when he renounces reality, and faery and somnambulism begin.

A double bark, bearing on one of its prows a dais, covered with flowers and precious stuffs, and rowed by twelve Polynesians who seem to obey an old, white-bearded man, covered with ornaments, draws nigh. Our hero and his comrades go to meet it. A combat ensues; the priest, who attacks Melville and the others with fury, is killed; his accolytes flee, and a young girl, hidden under the dais, fair as a European, transparent as mother-of-pearl, with eyes blue as an iris flower, becomes the prize of the travellers. It is a tulla, or white maiden, such as are sometimes seen here; her name is Aylla; the priest was carrying her, with great pomp, to a neighboring island, there to be sacrificed to the evil spirit. Melville

is taken with Aylla, who has nothing to recommend her but her beauty; you cannot imagine a heroine more insignificant, a divinity more insupportable.

As well as the somnambulism of this portion will permit one to guess the intention of the author, Aylla is Human Happiness, sacrificed by the priests, for Melville has a lurking rancor against the clergy since the N. Y. Evangelist accused him of irreverence.

Here begins the strange symbolical Odyssey-a clumsy imitation of Rabelais, and which will introduce us to a world of extravagant phantoms.

Turn by turn, the adventurer visits the chiefs of the smaller islands, each of which has a signification. Barabolla the gourmand, is modern epicureanism; Maranna is religion or superstition; Donjalolo is the poetic world; the antiquary Oh-oh, symbolizes learning. One chapter appears given to Spanish etiquette, another to Italian art, a third to French mobility. The Isle of Piminie is, I fancy, the gay world, whose society Mr. Melville satirizes in a way piquant enough. Young America mocks old Europe; nor do we object to receive from the young, precocious and robust child some lessons of which our decrepitude stands in need. We play very mournful comedies; but Mr. Melville is mistaken in his manner. What to us are the excursions of Melville, Sancoah, and Jarl? What have we to do with King Prello and King Xipho, who represent feudalism and military glory?

At last a Queen Hautia (pleasure, we suppose,) determined to carry off Melville, with whom she has fallen in love; sends him symbolical flowers, which he rejects, and so forth. Amid this chaos, the old theories of Holbach, the superannuated dogmata of Hegel, the pantheistic algebra of Spinosa, twist and jumble themselves into inextricable confusion. The philosophic common-places of the infidel school wear veils of

many symbolical folds, and the author seems to fancy that he is yet very bold.

The second volume is given to an obscure satire against European belief, and to pantheistic scepticism. Our travellers have lost Happiness, (Aylla) and will not accept Pleasure (Hautia) as a compensation. So they leave Mardi, a cloud-land-and so we pass from metaphysical symbolism to transparent Allegory.

Mardi is the modern political world. We are curious to see how a republican of the United States will judge of present and future civilization, and how explain the obscure problem of our destinies. Let us pass the strange names given to modern countries. England is Dominora; France, Franko; Spain, Ibiria; Rome, Romara; Germany, Apsburga; Canada, Kaneda. This is too much like our Rabelais, so fertile in appellation, whose mere sound can provoke pantagruelic titillation. Mr. Melville is by no means a magician of this kind. He has good sense and sagacity, and wishes to be humorous. It is more difficult.

The fantastic vessel bearing a poet, a philosopher, Mr. Melville and other fabulous persons, visits the shores of Europe or Porpheero-star of the morning; and of America, or Vivenza, Land of Life. They visit Germany, England, Spain, Italy, France. The author speaks of Great Britain with a profound and filial respect, and of Ireland with a severe pity quite Anglo-Saxon. At last he sees France-just as the year 1848 is about to begin.

"Gliding away from Verdanna at the turn of the tide, we cleared the strait, and gaining the more open lagoon, pointed our prows for Porpheero, from whose magnificent. monarchs my lord Media promised himself a glorious recep

tion.

"They are one and all demi-gods,' he cried, and have