ISRAEL POTTER reviewed in the New York TIMES

Bonhomme Richard and Serapis
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

The book version of Herman Melville's Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile received an unusually long and lovely review in the New York Times on April 30, 1855, published there with other "Notices of New Books." Before now, only a snippet of this glowing notice was readily available to Melville fans and scholars, as briefly quoted by Jay Leyda in the good old Melville Log (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) Volume 2, at page 501: 

"... Melville often, with a few words, selected with marvelous aptness, gives us a finer and more life-like description than most men create out of long chapters and thick books ..."

Leyda's short excerpt, dated April 30, 1855 in the Melville Log, derives from an otherwise unidentified newspaper clipping saved in Albany by Herman's cousin "Kate" and now in the Gansevoort-Lansing collection of the New York Public Library. Located I would guess in Catherine Gansevoort Lansing's "Scrapbook of clippings about Herman Melville and other literary men."

This long-lost item is not collected or mentioned in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). Transcribed in full below from the New York Daily Times of April 30, 1855.

New York Daily Times - April 30, 1855
via genealogybank.com

ISRAEL POTTER—HIS FIFTY YEARS OF EXILE.

By Herman Melville. New-York: G. P. PUTNAM & CO.

Publishing a book of this sort in the successive numbers of a monthly, is like carrying to one a rose leaf by leaf—where fragrance in such small installments can scarcely be appreciated. These Chapters of Mr. POTTER's experience, written down by the facile pen of MELVILLE, were among the chief attractions of Putnam's Monthly during the last year, but we were by no means impressed so pleasantly with them while they were the fragments of a serial, as now that the severed petals are regathered upon their proper stem, and bound handsomely, as it were, in a fitting sepal. It is a book to begin reading at night, when work is done, and to finish the next night. The meditations on it during the intervening day are pleasant. and the night's dreams will wander over a new track.

Israel Potter was a Yankee boy, who loved too young and ran away from his father because the old gentleman headed him off from the intended marriage. He was a private, and an effective one, at Bunker's Hill; and afterwards, while on board a brigantine appointed to intercept supplies going to the British quarters in Boston, is captured and carried to England. Then follow crowds of incidents, escapes from the hulks and from guard-rooms, wanderings over the land, and driftings hither and thither, new arrests and new escapes. He gets into all sorts of positions in his desire to escape detection in the enemy's country. He is lackey to mean men, the confidant of great ones, and at one time private gardener to the King, whom he called "Mister," and respectfully addressed as "Sir." These interviews of his with famous men furnish opportunities for episodes that are the finest portions of the book. The narration of his imprisonment in the private room of BENJAMIN FRANKLIN in Paris, gives us some pages of wholesome and homsespun philosophy not unlike or unworthy of Poor RICHARD. Another scene introduces us to the famous author of the Diversions of Parley.

Another chapter shows us old ETHAN TICONDEROGA ALLEN, as he bore it to be manacled and insulted by cowardly captors. Israel, by the fortunes of war, was a long time under the command of that buccaneering hero and American Naval officer PAUL JONES, and was in the Bonhomme Richard when he fought the great battle with the Serapis. This deadly encounter is sketched briefly, and with few lines. But MELVILLE often, with a few words, selected with marvelous aptness, gives us a finer and more life-like description than most men create out of long chapters and thick books; as one with a single crayon who knows how to handle it, sketches a better portrait than many dainty painters make out of their collection of finest colors, and after very tedious sittings.

The author is so brief about the forty years that roll over and almost crush the inborn Yankee cheerfulness out of his hero, that we wonder whether he really lacked the MSS. that contained the outlines of his story while he was sinking from the damp basement to the mouldy cellar, and from that to the muddy sewer, or whether the engagement with the publisher was "for only so many pages," of which the heroic took the lion's share. Then it grieved us at first that the tired old man could not have found one friend at least in the Housatonic country to sit down and chat with as his sun was sinking. But we remember that out of the magazines and in the world, wanderers, after fifty years of exile, seldom find a warm hearth or a familiar face to cheer them. So we must take it out in grieving that it is so, or be reconciled to authors that so make it.

The New York Times was then edited by co-founder Henry J. Raymond.