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thing presently. So, so; he’s beginning.And this unbridled extravagance in writing, this listless and profitless dreaming, and maundering with the pen in the hartd, is as it were supported and bucked by the wildness of conception and semi-supernatural tone of the Whole story. The author tdlls it in propria persona. He is a fore-mast man on board a South Sea whaler, the Old Peequod, of New Bedford. Ere he embarks, he seems to have left this mortal World, and lived in wild limbo of signs and portents. Eirst he fells in with a strange, wild, savage hnrponeer, a tabooed cannibal from a South Sea island, called Queequeg between whom and Melville a strange and mystic sympathy sprit)gs up. In Quefcqueg he recognises the sublimity of the anlfoal man, and the grandeur of the savage hero. The scenes in which the harpooneer and Melville pay adoration to Yojo, the god of the former, a deformed little graven image, and those in which tiueequeg keeps his Ramadan, sitting fasting for six and thirty hours, with his wooden god upon his head, are strange specimens of powerfully imaginative writing. So again is the interview between Melville and the two retired whaling captains, the owners of the Peequod, one of them a generous old sailor, the other a griping old screw ; but both pervaded with a certain species of quaint mystery, breaking out in strange hints and prophecies and allusions to the captain who is toqail bhfe ship,—Captain Abab, a morbidly strange conbeption , of chardctbr, ori which the notion of the book chiefly turns.; Melville and the savag^harpooheer do notemhatk without multitu-linous warnings as to the u grand ungodly godlike#ian» Captain Ahb.” A strange beggarly-looking personage* whfo; Calls himself Elijah, and utters whoje sybilline full of mysterious hints about the terrible captain, bftuht8 the newly-Cngaged sailors, appears suddenly to them FhMUcl corners, whispers ghostly words in their ears, mopes momes, fcndisya 14 morning to ve, mornihg,” when they wqftld question hipa, and flits away, and is seen no more. MciviHet however, screws up his courage, pronounces thisgentleman a humbug, and thev sail.
Newspaper Details
London Atlas
London, Middlesex, GB
Sat, Nov 01, 1851
Page 6
Full Page
Clipped by
Mount P.
IL, USA 01 Jun 2018
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