He, of a damsel, with fellow-maidens sporting,
In vital brilliance dropping through the star-gate
Of the high luminous land, was born;
And lifting into life his facial flower,
Throughout the vast passivity he passed,
All active; scaling on foot the mount,
That he his starry ancestry might hail,

There converse held, with all the eloquent orbs;
Adown a foamy torrent, in a skiff,

Dimpling the wave, he sped; great the show

Of lawny-weepers, lifted to dim eyes;

He fainted, asked the watery powers, and at last,
With eyne by spirit-fire purged, discerned

How sweet was truth, for death in truth was life.

Initiate, mystic, perfected, epopt,

Illuminate, adept, transcendent, he

Ivy-like lived, and died, and again lived,

Resuscitant-god of psycho-pompous function."

"THE MYSTIC."-Philip James Bailey.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

A WORD or two with reference to the following POEM, which is now for the first time presented to the civilized world.

That, in many of its parts, there is a strong correspondence between it and Mr. LONGFELLOW's last great work, "The Song of Hiawatha," is too apparent to be overlooked. But so far from basing upon this similarity of incident and treatment, a charge of literary piracy against Mr. LONGFELLOW, as has been done by some who have discovered a much fainter likeness to a poem of Scandinavian origin—the translator recognizes in it only another evidence of that unity of thought which characterizes the human species, and which is a natural consequence of the unity of the races, of which the great family of man is composed.

How far the "Song of Hiawatha," may be justly deemed an imitation, however, in outline, incident, or versification, of the Scandinavian or of the poem from the Feejee, here presented to our readers-it is for them, and not for the translator, to decide; but it is believed that a careful comparison, one with another, will disclose many curious resemblances in form and feature, which may be thought worthy the attention of men of letters.

It is hardly necessary to add that, so far as he was able to appreciate the spirit of the Poem, the translator has endeavored faithfully to retain it.

The liberties which he has taken have been verbal only, and such as are unavoidable in transplanting the ideas and emotions of a people from their own language to another.

For example, "Polli-wog-in" has been translated farmers, although the use of the word may seem a strange one to those into whose conception of the Feejee character, the idea of industry has never entered.

The reason, however, is obvious-since our estimates of things are always relative, and he who keeps a pig or grows a square yard of potatoes among a people dis

tinctively savage, judged by their standard of labor, is as emphatically a farmer, as the man who plows, in America, his hundred acres, and whose cattle graze upon a thousand hills.

Several words and forms of expression which in our language have become obsolete, such as her'n, his'n, ouch, not never, not for no one, did n't nothing, arolling, a-sitting, etc., are retained because of their striking analogy to words and expressions representing the same ideas in the Feejee tongue.

The word that designates the Water treatment which we call Hydropathy, is so rendered from the original, "Sit-an'-shiver."

If the objection be made to the scenes and characters as represented in the translation, that they indicate so advanced a stage of social progress as to suggest the probability of their having caught an unconscious coloring from the fancy of the translator, it may be fairly met with the presumption that a closer familiarity with the manners and mode of life of the Feejees, on the part of the reader, would show the invalidity of such objections.

To give an impulse to investigation in this direction

is the translator's only motive in publication, and his earnest hope is that this simple Poem may serve to interest the Christian World in the people among whom it is still preserved, and in whose midst he has spent several memorable years.

CLOVER DELL, Feb. 1856.