BY HERMAN MELVILLE.
MARDI.
2 Volumes, 12mo, Muslin, $1 75; Paper, $1 50.
A work such as was never heard of before. You might accumulate upon it all
the epithets which Madame de Servigné affectionated. Fancy Daphnis and Chloe
dancing I know not what strange gavotte with Aristotle and Spinoza, escorted by
Gargantua and Gargamelle. Mardi is the modern political world. This part is the
most piquant of the book. The colossal machine invented by Mr. Melville might
be compared to the American Panorama now placarded on the walls of London in
these terms: “Gigantic original American Panarama, now on exhibition in the great
American Hall; the prodigious moving Panorama of the Gulf of Mexico, the Falls of
St. Anthony, and of the Mississippi, covering an extent of canvass four miles long, and
representing more than 4000 miles of scenery.” Translated from the “Revue de Deux
Mondes.”
From the first chapter of the book to the last, where the hero is swept from our
sight in a cloud of spray, the book is a magnificent drama.
—Bentley's Miscellany
Mardi is a purely original invention an extraordinary book. It is a species of Utopia,
or, rather, a sea voyage in which we discover human nature. There is a world
of poetical, thoughtful, ingenious, moral writing in it, exhibiting the most various reflection
and reading. It is not significant that we should soon be swept beyond the
current of the isles into this world of high discourse—revolving the conditions, the
duties, and destinies of men?
—New York Literary World.
Mardi has posed us. It has struck our head like one of those blows which set
every thing dancing and glancing before your eyes like splintered sun's rays. The
images are brilliant; the adventures superb.
—London Literary Gazette.
Full of pictures from the under world.
—London Athenæum.
Mardi is full of all Oriental delights.
—Home Journal.
The reader who has business in Mardi will find it rich in wisdom and brilliant with
beauty. It is a magnificent allegory, wherein the world is seen as in a mirror. The
germ of the oak is not more surely hid in the acorn than Melville's fame in this book.
—Chronotype.
An extraordinary production. Mardi is the world.
—Musical Times.
There is strange interest, at times replete with power of a peculiar and uncommon
kind.
—Blackwood.
A sort of retina picture, or inverted view of the world under the name of Mardi.
Typee and Omoo are to this work as a seven-by-nine sketch of a sylvan lake with a
lone hunter, or a boy fishing, compared with the cartoons of Raphael.
—Dem. Rev.
A wonderful book; at once enthusiastic and epigrammatic; it burns at one and
the same time with an intense and richly colored glow of poetic ardor, and the more
glittering, but paler fires of an artful rhetoric.
—London Morning Chronicle.
Charles Lamb might have imagined such a party as Mr. Melville imagines at Pluto's
table
—London Examiner.
The public will discover in him, at least, a capital essayist in addition to the fascinating
novelist and painter of sea life.
—Literary World.
Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York.
