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.