tents; so that we easily baled out the remainder and again embarked. This time my comrade coiled himself away in a very small space; and, enjoining upon him not to draw a single unnecessary breath, I proceeded to urge the canoe along by myself. I was astonished at his docility, never speaking a word, and stirring neither hand nor foot; but the secret was he was unable to swim, and, in case we met with a second mishap, there were no more ledges beneath to stand upon. Drown ing's but a shabby way of going out of the world,' he exclaimed, upon my rallying him, and I am not going to be guilty of

it." "

Now the reader will observe that there is certainly some keeping in these two paragraphs-this, and the one before quoted. The jester, singer, story-teller, jolly companion, our poor Doctor, is made to behave with the same Parson Adams-like simplicity in both cases. But consider a moment the likelihood of such a series of incidents happening as here set down: Here are Typee and the Doctor, on shore, going to steal out to a ship in the little canoe called the Pill Box; now, though a craft with that name might have been deemed safer for himself by the Doctor, yet, seeing he could not swim, one would suppose he would have some misgivings, lest the two pills, or one of them, might be rather suddenly administered to the sharks, and would naturally have mentioned the fact of his not being able to swim to his companion. They had been cronies together a long while; the Doctor was a free man; he could not have been so weak as to risk his life by concealing, from mere pride, a want of ability nobody is ashamed to own, when a confession might have in part at least avoided such a risk. No, he would have told Typee, before they started, that he could not swim. Typee, my boy," he would have said, "avast there, my hearty! Shiver my topsails, but I can't swimcan't (he could quote Hudibras) dive like wild fowl for salvation,' that is, to save myself. So be careful." The reader may put it to his common sense, after reading Omoo up to that page, whether the Doctor could not and would not have made known, in some way, his inability before starting-or at least after the first capsize, when they were about to push out into deep water-and if he had, or had not, would he have "coiled himself away," as stated, and would Ty.

pee have been astonished at his docility until, at some indefinite period afterwards, Typee, sly dog, found out the secret was he could not swim? It would appear

from the sentence, by the way, that it was Typee who never spoke; but that may be an error of the press-the book has faults enough without noticing such

ones.

This analyzing a single paragraph may seem but mere flaw-picking and fault-finding, but ex uno, etc. we may learn almost the whole of the book, and where a single brick is sandy and crumbly, and most of the bricks in a house are so also, it is fair to exhibit a single brick as a specimen of the materials of which the house is built. Now we readily see that this little sketch of the canoe voyage represents two men in a dramatic posi tion; one a wit, the other an oddity. We can run through fifty such incidents done up in the same way with interest and pleasure, just as we can sit through and enjoy Don Cesar de Bazan, or any other impossible compound of wit and stage effect; only we wish not to have this sort of writing forced upon us under any other than its own proper name. It is mere frothy, sketchy outlining, that will bear the test of comparison with nature as little as would scene painting or the pictures on French paper hangings. If Typee were to tell his stories as he does, in the witness box, he would be a poor lawyer who could not make it evident to a jury that they would not stand sifting; his readiness and flippancy might make a brief impression while he was giving his evidence in chief, but it would take no very rigid cross-examination to bring him into discredit.

The truest pictures of nature will bear examination by a magnifying glass; but a painter is not expected to give daguerreotype likenesses. Neither is a writer of narrative expected to put in all the incidents of a matter; for the history of^ the most tedious day of our common life would fill a folio; but he is to follow nature so far as he can and so to suggest the rest that we shall seem to see the actual as he saw it. This there are many ways of accomplishing. Some writers go far into detail and yet are full of the truthseeing eye-the imaginative power; others have this power with less of detail. Shakspeare could paint a whole landscape, yea, and make it more vividly real than even if it were depicted on

canvas, in a few lines. "The heaven's breath smells wooingly here!" one can scarcely read that description of Macbeth's castle without inhaling the breath, as in walking over the brow of a hill in summer, when the wind blows upward from new-mown meadows. De Foe is the commonly cited instance of excellence in the other or detailed style of descriptive writing. We have all taken the walk with him where the brook flowed "due East" and the whole country seemed like "a planted garden," yet the spell that was over us while we wandered into that delicious region, was not one that operated by startling flashes, but by a steady, constant influence-the low murmuring music that as we read on in him is ever falling with a gentle lull upon the mind's ear.

Now in either of these kinds of description, a writer who affects us as true, must have the truth in him; that is, he must have the ideal in his mind which he would paint to us, and must draw and color from that, without being led astray either by his chalk or his colors. He must mean to describe faithfully what is before his mind's eye at the outset, and must so control his fancy and so use his language that neither shall mislead either himself or his readers, aside from his purpose. In this tedious process of writing and compelling the fancy to dwell upon far-off scenes, despite the temptations of the present, despite the glory of nature that is around us, despite of mortal heaviness, care, passion, personal grief, what infinite trouble is it to keep the impatient spirit under due obedience! Even as we write these sentences, our thoughts are oftener away than they are upon this writing; somewhat has come over us with years, it matters not what, so heavily that we can no more lose ourself, as the phrase goes, "in our subject." Other minds may be more happily constituted, but one may observe that those who trust their fancy most and yield to it farthest, are most liable to be led astray by it. It is only the great poets who seem to acquire control in and by the very tempest and whirlwind of their passion. With what perfect recklessness, yet what perfect self-possession, wrote our Shakspeare and Milton! Flight after flight, bolder than was that of him who was borne of Dedalian pinions, is dared and accomplished till it seems as if their will were almost godlike, and gave birth to power. Many

times in running through a play of Shakspeare hastily, we have felt the same feeling that we experienced in hearing one of HANDEL's mighty chorusses a kind of mysterious awe at the near presence of such terrible, burning strength; to read the glorious comedy of "As you like it" rapidly, for example, affects us like going into the engine room of one of our great Atlantic steamers, when she is just starting (a homely comparison and one the reader is welcome to smile at if he cannot understand) -or standing by a railroad track when a heavy train is passing-any such exhibition of irresistible force and motion. This feeling we have when we let the play rush through the mind-thought crowding upon thought and all glowing and sparkling; but in the midst of this fiery tumult, if we read more carefully, the great genius as smiling and placid as the expression of the bust we have of him would tell us he was; full of playfulness, delicacy, gentleness. O for such mental discipline. But all the mathematics in all the colleges in New England could never teach it.

Nor shall we be likely to learn it of the author of Omoo. For this control and discipline of the fancy seems to us just wherein he fails. He has all the confidence of genins, all its reckless abandonment, but little of its power. He has written a very attractive and readable book, but there are few among those who have an eye for nature and a lively fancy, but who could write as good a one if they had the hardihood-if they could as easily throw off all fear of making the judicious grieve. Were he put to his confession, there is no doubt but he would own that, in drawing pictures, he does not rigidly adhere to a fixed image, something that he has seen or remembers; that he does not endeavor to present his first landscape in a clear, strong, rich light, but often, as his narrative grows road weary, lets it throw the bridle rein of strict veracity on the neck of his fancy, and relieve itself by an occasional canter. At any rate the passage we have quoted, and hundreds of others, are quite as satisfactory evidence that he does so as would be such an admission.

But let us thank the author for the good he has given us before further considering the bad. We have more sympathy with recklessness than with obedient diligence, since it is the rarer and more difficultly combining element of a

great soul. A man who seems to write without the least misgiving—who dares the high with a constant conceit-will carry his point where a modest one, with ten times the inert strength, shall fail. There are men that can live years and ruffle it with the gayest, eat, drink and wear of the best, and owe whomsoever they please, by mere force of countenance, while a nervous one, whom a lady's eye abashes, may be either starving in a garret, or slaving for the ambitious, who catch him with the chaff of friendship. We confess we have more respect for your Brummells, than for your Burritts, that eat their way up in the world by devouring lexicons. The latter are good creatures in their way, to be sure; they do all the hard work for us and deserve to gain all they strive after; nay, we do not object to a modest man, for a small party, but at all times and places, we most especially admire impudence-admire-the word is not strong enough— we" cotton" to it; we envy it!

And if the reader sees the spirit of envy coloring this article, let him attribute it to this feeling. We do most heartily envy the man who could write such a book as Omoo, for nothing disturbs his serenity in the least; he is always in a good humor with himself, well pleased with what he writes, satisfied with his powers, and hence never dull. It must be owned he has some ground for complacency. He exhibits, on almost every page, the original ability to be an imaginative writer of the highest order. Some of his bits of description are very fine, and that in the highest and most poetic way. For instance, this of the Bay of Hannamanoo:

"On one hand was a range of steep green bluffs, hundreds of feet high; the white

huts of the natives, here and there, nest

ling like birds' nests in deep clefts, gush ing with verdure. Across the water, the land rolled away in bright hill-sides, so warm and undulating that they seemed almost to palpitate in the sun. On we swept, past bluff and grove, wooded glen and valley, and dark ravines lighted up, far inland, with wild falls of water. A fresh land-breeze filled our sails; the embayed waters were gentle as a lake, and every blue wave broke with a tinkle against our coppered prow."

Now, though" palpitate in the sun" is not a comparison that would spring up naturally in the mind of any but a wit, and though if the land-breeze blew fresh,

the Julia would have carried a "bone in her mouth," instead of the waves tinkling against her prow, as they might do in a calm, yet, as we read fast, this is a fine little view. Another paragraph contains an example of the good things scattered through the book, and is still better. The author writes: " Concerning the cockroaches in the forecastle, there was an extraordinary phenomenon for which none of us could ever account. Every night they had a jubilee. The first symptom was an unusual clustering and humming among the swarms lining the beams overhead, and the inside of the sleeping-places. This was succeeded by a prodigious coming and going on the part of those living out of sight. Presently, they all came forth; the larger sort racing over the chests and planks; winged monsters darting to and fro in the air; and the small fry buzzing in heaps, almost in a state of fusion."

There is no doubt about the excellence of the exaggeration in this last line; it is "maitai"-the buzzing out-Bozes Boz. Nor will any one who has ever visited the between-decks of an old whaler, just after she has been smoked out, be disposed to deny the truth of this story.

There are hundreds of such happy expressions in Omoo, and as many passages of description as good, or better, than that we have quoted. It is an ably written book; so good, in fact, (in point of ability, we mean of its moral tendency we shall speak presently)—that we are not pleased with it because it is not better. The author has shown himself so very capable of using a great style, and comes, at times, so near excellence, that we feel disposed to quarrel with him for never exactly reaching it. He is bold and self-contained; no cold timidity chills the glow of his fancy. Why does current of Thought, push out till he he not, before abandoning himself to the comes over the great channel of Truth? Or, not to speak in a parable, why does he not imitate the great describers, and give us pictures that will bear dissection, characters true to themselves, and a style that moves everywhere with the same peculiar measure?

Alas, Omoo finds it easier to address himself to the pit of the world than to the boxes. His heart is hard, and he prefers painting himself to the public of his native land as a jolly, rollicking blade-a charming, rattling, graceless ne'er-do-well. He meets no man, in all

his wanderings, whom he seems to care for-no woman whom he does not consider as merely an enchanting animal, fashioned for his pleasure. Taken upon L his own showing, in two volumes, and what is he but what a plain New Englander would call a "smart scamp?"

The phrase is a hard one, but it is certainly well deserved. Here is a writer who spices his books with most incredible accounts and dark hints of innumerable amours with the half-naked and halfcivilized or savage damsels of Nukuheva and Tahiti-who gets up voluptuous pictures, and with cool, deliberate art breaks off always at the right point, so as without offending decency, he may stimulate curiosity and excite unchaste desire. Most incredible, we style these portions of his stories, for several reasons.

First: He makes it appear always, that he was unusually successful with these poor wild maidens, and that his love-making was particularly acceptable to them. Now, if this had been so, we fancy we should have heard less of it. A true manly mind cannot sit down and coin dramas, such as these he gives us, for either others' delectation or its own. It is nothing new to hear conceited men boast of their perfect irresistibleness with the sex. "Oh, it is the easiest thing in the world," we remember, one of these gentry used to say, a la Mantalini; "a woman is naturally cunning, now only you keep cool and you'll soon see through her; a man must look out for himself, a woman for herself," &c. This very person, as we happened to know, through a confidential medical friend, could no more, at that very time, when his conversation was in this lofty strain, have wronged a woman, than Charteris could have committed the crime for which he was hung. Since then, and confirmed by various other experience, we have always doubted when we hear a man, especially on a short acquaintance, and most especially in a book that goes to the public, pluming himself on his virility-letting it be no secret that he is a " very devil among the women." Once, at a refectory in we were supping with a friend, when, the tables being full, there came a little, long-necked, falling-shouldered, pumpkin-faced young man, and took the end of ours. We exchanged a few words, and presently he dashed, without previous preparation, into a full confession of what he styled his " peculiar weakness," in which, if we were to believe him, he

let out enough to show that he might have out-bidden the Satyrs, in Spenser, for the favors of Helena. Our friend, who has command of visage, drew him on till he could not help smiling at his own lies. We made inquiry, and learned afterwards that he was a sheriff's clerk, or some such sort of thing, and that his name was Joseph.

Now, with a thousand such instances sleeping in the memory of years, we have no sort of confidence in the man who paints himself the hero of voluptuous adventures. Suppose any one of us

you or I, gentle reader-had been through the scenes Omoo depicts, we might-yea, even the best of us-have done as badly as he represents himself to have done; cast away from home and country, drifting about on the rim of the world, surrounded by license, and brimfull of animal health, we should very probably have made sad deviations from the "path of rectitude," but should we have come home and told of it? On the contrary, we should have kept as dark about the matter as possible; and nothing but some overmastering passion or motive could ever have made us reveal it. Native manhood is as modest as maidenhood, and when a man glories in his licentiousness, it raises a strong presumption that he is effete either by nature or through decay.

And this remark leads to our second reason for doubting the credibility of these amours. Taking the evidence of imbecility afforded by the reason just given, in conjunction with all that Omoo would have us believe he did (for he does not speak out in plain words like old Capt. Robert Boyle), and it cannot be possible, without Sir Epicure Mammon's wished-for elixir, that he could have the physical ability to play the gay deceiver at such a rate among those brawny islanders. This body of ours is very yielding it is true, and if a man resolutely sets his mind to imbrute himself he may go a great way; but a half year of such riotous life would have sufficed for one so proud of his exploits (if, indeed, this very display is not rather the result than one of the causes of a blasé condition-perhaps it is both).

Thirdly. We do not believe these stories, for the reason that those poor savage maids could not possibly have been such as Omoo describes them; they are not half so attractive. We have seen the drawings of Catlin, the elaborate French

engravings of the South American In. dians, Humboldt, Deprez, also some of New Zealand and those of our Exploring Expedition, and never yet saw we a portrait of a female half so attractive as the dumpiest Dutch butter-woman that walks our markets. Time out of mind we have heard whaling-captains dilate on the Marquesan beauties, but we always reflected that they appeared under peculiar advantages to the eyes of rough men just from long, greasy cruises, being somewhat negligently clad and without any of the restraint of civilization. Omoo may titillate the appetites of many of his readers by describing how he swung in a basket for hours at Tahiti with some particular friends of his," but he touches us not a jot. He is quite welcome to his " particular friends," they are not ours. The next stout boatsteerer that came along, with a rusty nail or a shred of an old bandana handkerchief, would disturb, we fear, our domestic felicity-knock us out of the basket, and go to swinging himself.

It seems necessary nowadays, for a book to be vendible, that it be venomous, and, indeed, venereous. Either so, or else it must be effeminate—pure, because passionless. The manliness of our light literature is curdling into licentiousness on the one hand and imbecility on the other; witness such books as Omoo, and the namby-pamby Tennysonian poetry we have of late so much of. Hence, authors who write for immediate sale are obliged to choose their department and walk in it. In some cases it is possible some have assumed vices which they had not, and in others affected an ignorance of temptation which was by no means their condition. We are willing to believe that Omoo is not so bad as he would have us think. He is merely writing in character, and it seemed necessary to pepper high. He may have more heart than he exhibits; and in a few months, when the last edition of his books has been sold, and all the money made from them that ever can be, he may repent him that he did not aim nobler. At the worst, he is no such chief of sinners that we need single him out for special condemnation. Have we not Don Juan? Is not the exhaustless invention of Gaul coining millions out of "nature's frailty?" When we consider the crimes of some of the modern novelwriters, Omoo seems but a "juvenile offender."

But we must not deal too leniently with him neither. That he is a Papalangi whose heart is set in him to do evil, appears no less by his glorying in his misdeeds, than by the spirit he manifests towards the Christian teachers of those ignorant pagans, whose vices he did all in his power to foster. The blue shark is on his forehead, and he is as palpable a barbarian as any tattooed New Zealander we ever saw stumbling, with jacket wrong side before and feet that till then never knew shoe, through the streets of New Bedford. He hates the missionaries. This is evident whenever he has occasion to mention them, and wherever there is room for a covert sneer at the little good they have accomplished. He was evidently afraid of them. It does not appear that he sought their acquaintance; but, from his whole way of speaking of them, the reader will not fail to gather the impression that he kept out of their way as much as possible. The spirit which he manifests towards them is what we should expect him to exhibit after his displaying his success with the damsels, "his particular friends." But the two spirits neutralize each other. A native of a Christian land, well-educated, and with a fair reputation for truth and veracity-that is to say, any man in his senses, with the common feelings of humanity, and worthy of belief, would have endeavored to make himself known to the missionaries, or indeed to any one in that remote and isolated spot who could speak English; on the other hand, a man who, under those circumstances, should not endeavor to make himself so known, but should prefer to associate with the savages, ought not to be entitled to credit when he speaks slightingly of the results of missionary labor. That the missionaries have not done all things as wisely as they might, had they known more; that they have been, and are, in many respects wrong and in error, may be very true; but Omoo is not the man to tell us so. He, who, by his own confession, never did anything to the islanders while he was among them but amuse himself with their peculiarities and use them for his appetites, is not the one to come home here and tell us the missionaries are doing little or nothing to improve them. All he did tended to make them worse, and it would be out of character if he should have now a benevolent purpose in so coloring his narratives