_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 Sais, 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 o