And then her eyes! they open their dark, rich orbs upon you like the full moon of heaven, and blaze into your very soul the fires of day! Like the offerings laid upon the sacrificial altars of the Hebrew, when in an instant the divine spark falling from the propitiated God kindled them in flames; so, a single glance from that Oriental eye as quickly fires your soul, and leaves your bosom in a perfect conflagration! Odds Cupids and Darts! with one broad sweep of vision in a crowded ball-room, that splendid creature would lay around her like the two-handed sword of Minotti, hearts on hearts, piled round in semi-circles! But it is well for the more rugged sex that this glorious being can vary her proud dominion, and give to the expression of her eye a melting tenderness which dissolves the most frigid heart and heals the wounds she gave before.
If the devout and exemplary Mussulman who dying fast in the faith of his Prophet anticipates reclining on beds of roses, gloriously drunk through all the ages of eternity, is to be waited on by Houris such as these: waft me ye gentle gales beyond this lower world and
“Lap me in soft Lydian airs!”
But I am falling into I know not what extravagances, so I will briefly give you a portrait of the last of these three divinities, and will then terminate my tiresome lucubrations.
Here, my dear M——, closes this catalogue of the Graces, this chapter of Beauties, and I should implore your pardon for trespassing so long on your attention. If you, yourself, in whose breast may possibly be extinguished the amatory flame, should not feel an interest in these three “counterfeit presentments,” do not fail to show them to —— and solicit her opinion as to their respective merits.
Tender my best acknowledgments to the Major for his prompt attention to my request, and, for yourself, accept the assurance of my undiminished regard; and hoping that the smiles of heaven may continue to illuminate your way,
I remain, ever yours,
L. A. V.
These “chaste and elegant sentiments” are, surely, “embellished with every polite accomplishment.” Melville called down the Nine Gods, and a host of minor deities; he ransacked Athens, Rhodes, Cyprus, Circassia, Lydia, Lilliputia, Damascus, this world and the next, for geographical adornments; he called up Burton, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Milton, Coleridge and Chesterfield, as well as Prometheus and Cinderella, Mahomet and Cleopatra, Madonnas and Houris, Medici and Mussulman, to strew carelessly across his pages. “Not in vain,” says Melville of the idealisation of himself in the character of Pierre, “had he spent long summer afternoons in the deep recesses of his father’s fastidiously picked and decorous library.” Not in vain, either, had he been submitted to three years of elementary drill in the classics at the Albany Academy. “Not that as yet his young and immature soul had been accosted by the wonderful Mutes, and through the vast halls of Silent Truth, had been ushered into the full, secret, eternally inviolable Sanhedrim, where the Poetic Magi discuss, in glorious gibberish, the Alpha and Omega of the Universe,” says Melville; “but among the beautiful imaginings of the second and third degree of poets he freely and comprehendingly ranged.” Melville was always a wide if desultory reader, more and more interested after the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and the Burton with reference to whom he began his career in letters, in “remote and curious illusions, wrecks of forgotten fables, antediluvian computations, obsolete and unfamiliar problems, riddles that no living Œdipus would care to solve.” And this preoccupation—first made manifest in Mardi (1849)—must always stand in the way of his most typical writings ever becoming widely popular. His earliest known piece of juvenile composition is interesting as revealing the crude beginnings of one of the manners superbly mastered in parts of Moby-Dick. This early effusion, by revealing so crudely the defects of his qualities, reads as a dull parody of one of his most typical later manners.