Friday, April 21, 2017

Another Melville reference by John W. Overall in the New Orleans Sunday Delta

Today's search on Newspapers.com for Melville notices in newspapers added there within the past month yields another reference to Typee by Virginia-born journalist and poet John Wilford Overall. This Melville notice appears in Overall's regular "Paragraphs for the Times" column, as published in the New Orleans Sunday Delta on January 24, 1858. 

Found on Newspapers.com
Nevertheless, the romantic reader should not yearn for Simla, like the infatuated youth who fell in love with the Marquesas Islands, and went thither to find Melville's beautiful Typee Fayaway, with her liquid eyes, streaming locks, and girdle and robe of colored tappa, standing in the tabooed boat in the lake of the "Happy Valley." Paradises of the Simla and Typee order give not heart-happiness. Somebody said—we believe it was Wordsworth—that
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy."  
True enough; only it continues as long as humanity will permit it to lie about us. Heaven is within us, around us and above us, if we will have it so. That is all. 
--John W. Overall, "Paragraphs for the Times" in The Sunday Delta, January 24, 1858
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