Much of the charm of Huckleberry Finn results from Twain's having tempered his satire with long, lyric descriptions of the Mississippi River, and, conversely, the bitter tone of Melville's The Confidence-Man has turned away readers because of the lack of any comparable scenic relief. “The setting Melville hit upon was the perfect one for such a book, but the setting is named or indicated rather than fully rendered. One is alleged to be on a steamboat descending the greatest of American rivers, but sensuously, pictorially, kinaesthetically, one has little or no sense of being on such a boat or such a river.” The opinion is Newton Arvin's, who credits this absence of natural description to the low ebb of “Melville's purely plastic power, his fictive and dramatic power.” According to Arvin, “the magical power of sensuous embodiment that had rendered the sea with such grandeur in Moby Dick had now failed him, all but wholly.”