1. _The New and the Old_; or California and India in Romantic Aspects. By J.W. PALMER, M.D. New York: Rudd & Carleton. 1859.
2. _Up and Down the Irawaddi_; being Passages of Adventure in the Burman Empire. By the Same.
It has passed into a scornful proverb, that it needs good optics to see what is not to be seen; and yet we should be inclined to say that the first essential of a good traveller was to be gifted with eyesight of precisely that kind. All his senses should be as delicate as eyes; and, above all, he should be able to see with the fine eye of imagination, compared with which all the other organs with which the mind grasps and the memory holds are as clumsy as thumbs. The demand for this kind of traveller and the opportunity for him increase as we learn more and more minutely the dry facts and figures of the most inaccessible corners of the earth's surface. There is no hope of another Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, with his statistics of Dreamland, who makes no difficulty of impressing "fourscore thousand rhinocerots" to draw the wagons of the King of Tartary's army, or of killing eight hundred and fifty thousand men with a flourish of his quill,--for what were a few ciphers to him, when his inkhorn was full and all Christendom to be astonished?--but there is all the more need of voyagers who give us something better than a census of population, and who know of other exports from strange countries than can be expressed by $----. Give us the traveller who makes us feel the mystery of the Figure at Saïs, whose veil has a new meaning for every beholder, rather than him who brings back a photograph of the uncovered countenance, with its one unvarying granite story for all. There is one glory of the Gazetteer with his fixed facts, and another of the Poet with his variable quantities of fancy. The fixed fact may be unfixed next year, like an almanac, but the hasty sketch of the true artist is good forever.
Critics have a good-natured way of stigmatizing, for the initiated, all poetry that is not poetry, by saying that it is "elegant," "harmonious," or, worse than all, "descriptive." This last commonly means that the author has done for his readers precisely what they could do for themselves,--that he has made a catalogue of the natural objects to be found in a certain number of acres, which differs from the literary efforts of an auctioneer only in this, that each line begins with a capital and contains the same number of syllables. He counts the number of cabbages in a field, of cows in a pasture, and tells us how many times a squirrel ran up (or down) a given tree in a given time. He informs us that the bark of the shagbark is shaggy, that the sleep-at-noon slumbers at mid-day, that moss is apt to grow on fallen tree-trunks in damp places,--treats us as the old alchemists do, who give us a list of the materials out of which gold (if it had any moral sense) would at once consent to be made, but somehow won't,--and leaves us impressed with that very dead certainty, that things are so-and-so, which is the result of verses that are only so-so.