"Peace to Lord Nelson where he sleeps in his mouldering mast! but rather would I be urned in the trunk of some green tree, and even in death have the vital sap circulating round me, giving of my dead body to the living foliage that shaded my peaceful tomb ". His uniquely ingenious mind follows this in the next chapter with another phrase, describing the battle of Navarino in the words of Jack Chase, who fought there. "Showers of burned rice and olives from the exploding foe fell upon us like manna in the wilderness. 'Allah! Allah! Mohammed! Mohammed!' split the air; some cried it out from the Turkish port-holes; others shrieked it forth from the drowning waters, their topknots floating on their shaven skulls like black snakes on half-tide rocks."

These sudden ascensions are conspicuous because infrequent; mostly the prose is adequate to the plain matter of the story. The brave outbursts, indeed, are welcome after chapters in which propaganda is the aim, as in divers chapters against flogging and rehearsals of various illegalities practised upon seamen. Yet even in an historical chapter entitled " Flogging Not Necessary "the instinct to exalt his theme with Biblical vehemence and lyricism cannot be resisted, for indignation is touching the springs of poetry in him. Nobler passages than the following have been written by few :

"Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an express dispensation; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. Seventy

years ago we escaped from thrall; and, besides our first birthright-embracing one continent of earthGod has given to us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our wisdom. At a period when other nations have but lisped, our deep voice is heard afar. Long enough have we been sceptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world."

Strange to reflect that the author of this uplifted and uplifting plea was speaking to and vindicating a nation which as yet still clung to its slaves, and was to waste a multitude of lives in determining whether slavery was right or wrong. And strange, also, to remember that when White Jacket was published in 1850, and praised by some who later could only scoff at Moby-Dick, the scope of his genius was misapprehended, and he was looked to as one who might enlarge the library of fictitious adventure-ironical praise for a literal record of things done and endured! Perhaps

it was a subtle praise beyond the intention of the critic, since White Jacket's practicality did not obscure from all eyes the deeper, trance-like character of the book; comparison being made with the mood of The Ancient Mariner. If Melville knew of this, and of the future held out to him, he must have been not less amused than vexed.

CHAPTER VI

MARDI AND PIERRE

IT was Mardi that drew from the French a phrase which very neatly describes Melville as the author of that romance—an American Rabelais. Any one can show how ludicrous it is to compare Melville's asceticism with Rabelais' indulgence, but any one can see as well how truly Melville's intellectual riotings and spiritual musings match the aboundingness of the French creator. An American Rabelais, perhaps, if the name be grudged, but certainly another Rabelais. Mardi, however, must be looked at for its own sake and apart from its reminder of that huge and irregular genius; and better still to contrast it with another book of Melville's, equally extravagant but more perplexingPierre. For Mardi records an unending chase, but Pierre a chase, a challenge, an encounter ending in disaster.

Mardi preceded Pierre by more than three years, but whole centuries are needed to signify the distance between them. In the preface to the former the author says the thought (mentioned in an earlier chapter here) that his fiction might be taken for truth was the germ of others which have resulted in Mardi

an intellectual germ resulting in an intellectual book. From this book all but a “masculine persuasive force" has been expelled. The tenderness of an extreme sensibility, the natural admirations and passions which quicken earlier and later books, are here stilled; Burton and Sir Thomas Browne have shipped with Herman Melville on a whaler, ghostly, sly confederates, whispering brightly or darkly at his ear. At first the voyage is a mere voyage, starting jejunely with, "We are off! The courses and topsails are set." It was the nobly named "Arcturion ", an exceedingly dull ” ship, so dull, bound on so dull a voyage, that to endure it is impossible. Taji, as the hero of the romance is named when his lot is cast among the natives of Polynesia, suborns an old Skyeman, Jarl by name, to desert the ship; and a good part of the story is concerned with their desertion, their capture of the "Parki", its loss in a storm, and their subsequent conflict with islanders. Until this point is reached Melville conducts his story with the pleasant ease of Omoo, and a touch of inconsequence pleasanter still; something new, in fact, stirs in the narrative, a lightness that comes with the discovery of the two native stowaways on the deserted ship, Samoa and Annatoo.

Here was the strangest pair
In the world anywhere.

Never did husband and wife lead more jarring lives by day, or sleep more forgivingly at night. Annatoo's pilferings, so vain and purposeless, Samoa's inability to govern her-"Ah! Annatoo: Woman unendurable: deliver me, ye gods, from being shut up in a ship with such a hornet again". She had offered