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?