Venice, that lovely city by the sea, has been described a thousand times by the painter’s brush, by the poet’s pen. It is the last bit of poetry left to us, in the ever increasing dulness of this world—the only place that one would expect to meet a goblin or a genial Irish fairy. It is not the intention of this paper to describe the queenly city. More than a thousand kodak fiends are daily doing that work, with the eagerness of a money-lender and the artistic sense of a fence painter. A city may, however, have many attractions, other than its magic beauty; nay, even a dull uninteresting place may become interesting from some great historic event that happened there, or from some impression caught and treasured in memory’s store-house. Venice has a charm for me other than the poetry that lurks in its every stone; it was there that I first dipped into one of those rare books whose charms grow around the heart soft and green as a vine-tendril.

A professor of mine, one of those men who hugs one saying in life, thereon building a false reputation for wisdom, was in the habit of saying, “Accidents are the spice of life.” As it is his only contribution approaching the threshold of the philosopher’s goddess that I heard in the five years of his weary cant, I willingly record it. To me it expresses a truth, albeit five years is a long hunt. Illustrations sometimes improve the text, and this brief paper, by the way, is but a design to enhance the professor’s. It was an accident, pure and simple, that made me wend my way to the Rialto, there to lean against the parapet watching some probably great unknown painting, something that might be anything the imagination cared to conjure up. It was an accident that made an English divine ask me in sputtering French what the painter was working on. It was an accident that made me inform him in common American English that my telescope, by some accidental foresight, was at my lodgings. The divine was a genial man, one of those breaths of spring that we sometimes meet in life. Invited to my lodgings, he fancied a few tiny volumes of the apostle of “sweetness and light” to pass those hours that hang heavily, in all lands save Eden. In my pocket he thrust, as he remarked, “a no ordinary book, one that will hold you as in a vice.” This proceeding was rather remarkable, had he not in the same breath invited me to take a gondola to one of the isles, and there enjoy the pocketed volume. It is delightful to meet a genuine man, speaking your mother-tongue, after weary months of Italian delving. To the little isle we went, an isle known to readers of Byron, as the place where he labored long under Armenian monks to learn their guttural tongue, the monks say “with success.” I knew nothing, in those days, of destructive criticism. After a tour in the monastery, of the ordinary Italian type, I lay down on the green sward under the beneficent shade of a huge palm, wrapped in the odors of a thousand flowers that sleepily nodded to the music of the creamy breakers on the rocky shore. Books have their atmosphere as well as men. Deprive them of it, and many a charm is lost. I drew the little volume from my pocket, and there in that atmosphere, akin to the one in which it was begot, I read of life in summer seas, life that floats along serene and sweet as a bell-note on a calm, frosty night, life

My Anglican friend was unable to give any clue to the author’s identity, other than what the meagre title-page afforded. The title-page was of that modest kind that says, “Enter in and see for yourself.” It had none of the tricks of book-making, and none of the airs of a parvenu. Under other skies than Italian I learned that the author of “South Sea Idyls,” Charles Warren Stoddard, poet and traveller, was one of the kindest and most modest of men. In truth, that it was the combination of these rare qualities that had kept him from the crowd when lesser men made prodigious sales of their wares. To the man of mediocrity, it is a tickling sensation to float with the current to the music of the shore-rabble, who shout from an innate desire to hear their voices. With the possessor of that rare gift, genius, the mouthings of the present count little; it is for a future hold on man, that he toils. It is to do something, to paint a face, to carve a bust whose glorious shape shall hand to the ages a form of beauty, to weave a snatch of melody that shall go down the stream of time consoling dark souls. Mediocrity is mortal, genius immortal. The common mind, without bogging in metaphysics or transcendentalism, subjects so dear to American critics, may readily grasp the destination by a comparison in poetry of the “Proverbial Philosophy” with “In Memoriam,” in prose “Barriers Burned Away,” with “Waverly.” Another point for mediocrity, perhaps from its possessor’s view the best: it is well recompensed in this life. The very reverse is the case with genius. If then the author of the “South Sea Idyls” is not as popular with the crowd as the writers of short stories who revel in analysis, whether it be a gum-boil or the falling of my lady’s fan, he can have no fear. It is but his badge of superiority. The few great men, who are the literary arbiters of each century, have spoken, and their verdict is the verdict of posterity. “One does these things but once,” say they, “if one ever does them, but you have done them once for all; no one need ever write of the South Sea again.” Here, it is well to impress on the casual reader, in the light of this verdict, a great historic truth cobwebbed over by critical spiders; that it was not the Italians that gave the chaplet to Dante, nor the Spaniards to Cervantes, nor the Portuguese to CamoËns, nor the Germans to Goethe, but the great cosmopolitan few, scattered over the world, guardians of the garden of immortality.

Charles Warren Stoddard was born in Rochester, N. Y., 7th August, 1843. At an early age he left his native state, with his family and emigrated to California, that fertile foster-mother of American literary men. In that delightful state, region of plants and flowers, was passed his boyhood, a boyhood rich in promise, strengthened by a good education. With a natural bent for travel, fed by the tales of travellers and the waters of romance, it was his happy luck, at the age of twenty-three to find himself appointed to that really bright journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, as its correspondent. The commission was a roving one, and the young correspondent was left free to contribute sketches in his own inimitable way. Let us believe that the editor well knew the choice mind he had secured in the young writer, and so knowing was unwilling to put restrictions of the common newspaper kind in his way. How could such a correspondent be harnessed in the dull statistics and ribald gossip of these days? It was otherwise, as we his debtors know. He was to wander at his own sweet will. The slight vein of sweet melancholy that came with his life, drove him far from the grimy haunts of civilization, far from the sickening thud of men thrown against the cobble-stones of poverty. He sailed away with not a pang of sorrow to those golden isles embedded in summer seas, where the moon

To a man of Stoddard’s genius and delicate perception, one thing could have been foreseen. These lands yet warm with the sunshine of youth would play melodies on his soul, as the winds on Æolian harps; melodies hitherto unknown to the jaded working world. That he could catch these airs and give them a tangible form, was not so sure. Others had heard these siren airs, but failed to yoke them to speech. Melville, now and then, had reproduced a few notes; notes full of dreamy beauty, making us long for the master who was to give the full and perfect song. That master was found in Stoddard. He produced, as Howells so finely has said, “the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that ever were written about the life of that summer ocean,” things “of the very make of the tropic spray,” which “know not if it be sea or sun.” Whether you open with a prodigal in Tahiti and see for yourself “that there are few such delicious bits of literature in the language,” or follow the writer, who, thanking the critics, prefers to find out for himself the worth of a writer, commences at the beginning with the charming tale of “Kana-ana,” you will be in company with the acute critic who has pronounced the life of the summer sea, “once done,” by Stoddard, “and that for all time.” What should we look for in such a book? “Pictures of life, for melody of language, for shapes and sounds of beauty;” and these are to be found without stint in the “South Sea Idyls.” The form of Kana-ana haunts me, “with his round, full girlish face, lips ripe and expressive, not quite so sensual as those of most of his race; not a bad nose, by any means; eyes perfectly glorious—regular almonds—with the mythical lashes that sweep.” Kana-ana, who had tasted of civilization, finding it hollow, pining for his own fair land, and when restored to the shade of his native palms, wasting away, dying delirious, in his tiny canoe, rocked to death by the spirit of the deep. Or is it Taboo—“the figure that was like the opposite halves of two men bodily joined together in an amateur attempt at human grafting, whose trunk was curved the wrong way; a great shoulder bullied a little shoulder, and kept it decidedly under; a long leg walked right around a short leg that was perpetually sitting itself down on invisible seats, or swinging itself for the mere pleasure of it,” meeting him by the enchanting cascade. Or is it Joe of Lahaina, whose young face seemed to embody a whole tropical romance. Joe, his bright scape-grace, met with months after in that isle of lost dreams and salty tears, the leper-land of Molokai. Who shall forget the end of that tale, where the author steals away in the darkness from the dying boy?

“I shall never see little Joe again, with his pitiful face, growing gradually as dreadful as a cobra’s, and almost as fascinating in its hideousness. I waited, a little way off in the darkness, waited and listened, till the last song was ended, and I knew he would be looking for me to say good night. But he did not find me, and he will never again find me in this life, for I left him sitting in the dark door of his sepulchre—sitting and singing in the mouth of his grave—clothed all in Death.”

It matters little whether it be Kana-ana, Taboo or Joe of Lahaina, the hand of a master was at their birth, the spell of the wizard is around them. The full development of Stoddard’s genius is not found in character-drawing, great as that gift undoubtedly is, but in his wonderful reproduction of the ever-changing hues of land and sea, under the tropical sun. What description is better fitted to fill the eye with beauty, the ear with melody, than these lines from the very first page of his “South Sea Idyls?”

“Once a green oasis blossomed before us—a garden in perfect bloom, girdled about with creamy waves; within its coral cincture pendulous boughs trailed in the glassy waters; from its hidden bowers spiced airs stole down upon us; above all the triumphant palm trees clashed their melodious branches like a chorus with cymbals; yet from the very gates of this paradise a changeful current swept us onward, and the happy isle was buried in night and distance.”

It is not easy to make extracts from this charming book. It is a mosaic, to be read as a whole. A tile, no matter how beautiful it may be, can give no adequate conception of the mosaic of which it forms a part. It may, however, stimulate us to procure it. These extracts taken at random, would that they might have the same effect. The book, once so rare, is now within the easy reach of all. The new edition lately published by the Scribners is all that one could ask, and is a fitting home for the undying melodies of the summer seas. To read it is to be reminded of the opening lines of Endymion.

Stoddard’s other works are a volume of poems, San Francisco, 1867; “Mashallah,” a work that produces, as no other work written in English, the Egypt of to-day. In this work his touch is as light as that of Gautier, while his eyes are as open as De Amicis; and a little volume on Molokai. At present he is the English professor at the Catholic University.

With the quoting of a little poem, “In Clover,” a poem full of his delicate touches, I close this sketch of a writer to whom I am much indebted for happy hours under Italian skies and in Adirondack camps.