saw the cemetery of his family-big as that of a small village, all his wives and children and servants. All gilt and carved. The women's tombs carved with heads (women no souls). The Sultan Suleiman's tomb & that of his three brothers in a kiosk. Gilded like mantel ornaments.'

Clarel was, in 1876, printed at Melville's expense. More accurately, its printing was made possible by his uncle, Hon. Peter Gansevoort, who, as Melville says in the dedication, “in a personal interview provided for the publication of this poem, known to him by report, as existing in manuscript."

Not the least impressive thing about Clarel is its length: it extends to 571 pages. Mr. Mather states: "Of those who have actually perused the four books (of verse) and Clarel, I am presumably the only survivor." Mr. Mather is mistaken there are two. But since, because of the excessive length of Clarel and the excessive scarcity of John Marr and Timoleon (both privately printed in an edition of only twentyfive copies) it would be over-optimistic to presume that there will soon be a third, some account must be given of Melville's poetry.

Stevenson once said: "There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have been neglected; 'He shall be able to see'; 'He shall be able to tell'; 'He shall be able to charm,' said the friendly godmothers; 'But he shall not be able to hear!' exclaimed the last." When Stevenson wrote his passage, the artist in him seems for the moment to have slept; taking no account of Melville's frequent mastery of the magic of words, he berates Melville's genius for misspelling Polynesian names as a defect of genius. That Melville had an ear sensitive to the cadences of prose is shown by the facility with which he on occasion caught the rhythm both of the Psalms and of Sir Thomas Browne. Yet the same man who at his best is equalled only by Poe in the subtle melody of his prose, at times fell into ranting passages of obvious and intolerable parody of blank verse. The following from Mardi is an example: "From dawn till eve, the bright, bright

days sped on, chased by the gloomy nights; and, in glory dying, lent their lustre to the starry skies. So, long the radiant dolphins fly before the sable sharks; but seized, and torn in flames —die, burning:—their last splendour left, in sparkling scales that float along the sea." In his poetry, as in his prose, is the same incongruous mating of astonishing facility and flagrant defect. It is the same paradox that one finds in Browning and in Meredith, whose poetry Melville's more than superficially resembles. Melville shared with these men a greater interest in ideas than in verbal prettiness, and like the best of them, when mastered by a refractory idea, he was not over-exquisite in his regard for prosody and syntax in getting it said. When he had a mind to, however, he could pound with a lustiness that should endear him to those who delight in declamation contests: a contemptible distinction, perhaps but even that has been denied him. The poem to the Swamp Angel, for example, the great gun that reduced Charleston, is fine in its irony and vigour. The poem begins:

There is a coal-black Angel

With a thick Afric lip

And he dwells (like the hunted and harried)

In a swamp where the green frogs dip

But his face is against a City

Which is over a bay by the sea,

And he breathes with a breath that is blastment

And dooms by a far degree.

Though there are memorable lines and stanzas in BattlePieces, only one of the poems in the volume has ever been at all noticed: Sheridan at Cedar Creek, beginning:

The following letter to his brother Tom bears upon Mel

ville's Battle-Pieces.

"PITTSFIELD, May 25th, 1862.

"MY DEAR Boy: (or, if that appears disrespectful)

"MY DEAR CAPTAIN:

"Yesterday I received from Gansevoort your long and very entertaining letter to Mamma from Pernambuco. Yes, it was very entertaining. Particularly the account of that interesting young gentleman whom you so uncivilly stigmatise for a jackass, simply because he improves his opportunities in the way of sleeping, eating & other commendable customs. That's the sort of fellow, seems to me, to get along with. For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible & sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long friendly snooze together, under the sod—no quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heartburnings, & thinking how much better that other chap is off-none of this: but all equally free-&-easy, they sleep away & reel off their nine knots an hour, in perfect amity. If you see your sleepy ignorant jackass-friend again, give him my compliments, and say that however others may think of him, I honour and esteem him.— As for your treatment of the young man, there I entirely commend you. You remember what the Bible says:

"Oh ye who teach the children of the nations,
Holland, France, England, Germany or Spain,
I pray ye strap them upon all occasions,

It mends their morals-never mind the pain."

"In another place the Bible says, you know, something about sparing the strap & spoiling the child.-Since I have quoted poetry above, it puts me in mind of my own doggerel. You will be pleased to learn that I have disposed of a lot of it at a great bargain. In fact, a trunk-maker took the whole lot off my hands at ten cents the pound. So, when you buy a new trunk again, just peep at the lining & perhaps you may be

rewarded by some glorious stanza staring you in the face & claiming admiration. If you were not such a devil of a ways off, I would send you a trunk, by way of presentation-copy. I can't help thinking what a luckless chap you were that voyage you had a poetaster with you. You remember the romantic moonlight night, when the conceited donkey repeated to you about three cables' length of his verses. But you bore it like a hero. I can't in fact recall so much as a single wince. To be sure, you went to bed immediately upon the conclusion of the entertainment; but this much I am sure of, whatever were your sufferings, you never gave them utterance. Tom, my boy, I admire you. I say again, you are a hero.-By the way, I hope in God's name, that rumour which reached your owners (C. & P.) a few weeks since that dreadful rumour is not true. They heard that you had begun to take to-drink?—Oh no, but worse to sonnet-writing. That off Cape Horn instead of being on deck about your business, you devoted your time to writing a sonnet on your mistress' eyebrow, & another upon her thumbnail.-'I'll be damned,' say Curtis (he was very profane) 'if I'll have a sonneteer among my Captains.'—'Well, if he has taken to poetising,' says Peabody-God help the ship!'

And now, my boy, if you knew how much laziness I overcame in writing you this letter, you would think me, what I am "Always your affectionate brother,

"HERMAN."

Melville's family seem all to have been more sceptical of his verse than they were of his prose. In 1859 Mrs. Melville wrote to her mother "Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell any one, for you know how such things get around." Mrs. Melville was too optimistic: her husband's indiscreet practice is still pretty much a secret to the world at large. And Clarel, his longest and most important poem, is practically impossible to come by.

In 1884, Melville said of Clarel in a letter to Mr. James Billson: "a metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity."

Though this is completely true, Melville used in Clarel more irony, vividness, and intellect than the whole congregation of practising poets of the present day (a few notable names excepted) could muster in aggregate. Yet with all this wealth of the stuff of poetry, the poem never quite fulfils itself. In Clarel Melville brings together in the Holy Land a group of pilgrims; pilgrims nearly all drawn from the life, as a study of his Journal of 1856-7 shows. In this group there are men devout and men sceptical, some suave in orthodoxy, and some militant in doubt. There are dreamers and men of action; unprincipled saints, and rakes without vice. In the bleak and legend-haunted Holy Land Melville places these men, and dramatises his own reactions to life in this setting. The problem of faith is the pivot of endless discussion: and upon this pivot is made to turn all of the problems of destiny that engage a "pondering man." These discussions take place against a panorama of desert and monastery and shrine. In some of the interpolated songs of Clarel, Melville almost achieved the lyric mood.

My shroud is saintly linen,

In lavender 'tis laid;

I have chosen a bed by the marigold

And supplied me a silver spade.

And there are, too, incidental legends and saints' tales:

Those legends which, be it confessed
Did nearer bring to them the sky-

Did nearer woo it in their hope

Of all that seers and saints avow

Than Galileo's telescope

Can bid it unto prosing science now.

Clarel is by all odds the most important record we have of what was the temper of Melville's deeper thoughts during his long metaphysical period. Typical quotations have already been made.

The most recurrent note of the poem is a parched desire for companionship; a craving for