Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674186620, 9780674181595

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Herman Melville CYCLE

AND

EPICYCLE

Herman Melville CYCLE

AND

EPICYCLE

Eleanor Melville Metcalf With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er. Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VIII

H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S • C A M B R I D G E • 1953

C o p y r i g h t , 1 9 5 3 , by the President a n d Fellows of H a r v a r d

Distributed in G r e a t Britain b y Geoffrey

Cumberlege

O x f o r d University Press, London

Library of C o n g r e s s C a t a l o g C a r d N u m b e r

52-9393

Printed in the United States of America

College

TO HARRY, DAVID, AND

PAUL

PREFACE This book has largely been made possible by the conversations and correspondence I have enjoyed over a period of thirty-odd years with those whose interest in Melville has led them to careful research and sympathetic thought in preparation for their own writing; and by the generosity with which they have shared with me the results of their study (often before publication) during the five years of my own research. I have included here much family correspondence and a number of diary entries never before published, and a most important new letter of Sophia Hawthorne's to her mother about Melville. I have also added a postscript touching on some of the developments from Melville's death to the present recognition of his place in world literature. In preparing the text I have corrected obvious careless mistakes in spelling, replaced an occasional comma with a period where a sentence ended, and added a period where it was needed to make sense—this in the interest of easier reading; but I have kept the characteristic "&" of the last century, and Melville's own frequent use of the dash. I have also taken some liberties with the original form of the letters, compressing (for reasons of space) the many-lined salutations and complimentary closings; and at times I omitted inconsequential postscripts from letters which otherwise are given in full. Where vagaries of spelling and punctuation are characteristic, and not merely careless, I have left them. There are but few of these—an early letter of Melville's to his uncle Peter Gansevoort, and several to Melville from an old shipmate. Although many members of the Melville family spelled their name without the final e, I have used consistently, for all members of the family, the spelling preferred by Herman Melville himself. M y acknowledgments for generous and thoughtful help in the matter of answering specific questions and permitting the use of material, I gratefully make first and foremost to Mrs. Beatrix Hawthorne Smyth, Hawthorne's granddaughter, who gave me access to the hitherto unpublished letter of Sophia Hawthorne's to her mother, the most important letter ever written about Melville. She also allowed me to

viii

PREFACE

read, and quote from, other interesting letters and diaries in her family collection.* T o Dr. John D. Gordan, curator of the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, I owe my introduction to Mrs. Smyth, through his suggestion that I write to Mrs. Louise Hall Tharp, who would (and did) aid me in any way possible. Among others to whom I gratefully owe information or the use of material are my second cousin Agnes Morewood, who gave me access to her family records; her sister Helen, who clarified for me a question of Pittsfield geography; and her sister Margaret, who reported to me a conversation she had with her mother, Melville's niece, about Melville and his wife: also to the late Dr. A. S. W . Rosenbach, who gave me, permission to quote from Melville's letter to Harper and Brothers of February 20, 1854. This letter was given by Dr. Rosenbach shortly before he died to the Philip H. and A. S. W . Rosenbach Foundation at 2010 Delancey Street, Philadelphia. I am indebted to Mr. Bradley Martin for permission to use Melville's letter to Hawthorne, January 8, 1852, and the letters from Melville to Richard Bentley in his collection; to Mrs. William Ellery Sedgwick for the use of a letter among the Sedgwick papers, first brought to my attention by Jay Leyda; to Dr. Joseph Edward Fields for permission to quote from two letters in his possession; to Professor Norman Holmes Pearson for the use of Hawthorne's letter to Lewis Mansfield, June 17, 1850, and to Mr. Clifton Waller Barrett for the use of Melville's letter to Havelock Ellis, January 5, 1890. I am grateful to Randall Stewart, who supplied me with Hawthorne's pleasantly rebellious notation on smoking which he discovered by infrared photography and used in his Nathaniel Hawthorne, and for permission to quote from other passages in his editions of both the American and English Notebooks of Hawthorne. His permission was warmly seconded by the Yale University Press in the one case, and by the Modern Language Association, publishers, in the other. T o William H. Gilman I owe valuable knowledge of Melville's Albany years, which he includes in Melville's Early Life and Redburn, published in 1951 by the New York University Press. T o Harrison Hayford I am indebted for leads to material I might have missed, gleaned from his unpublished doctoral dissertation, "Melville and Hawthorne," Yale University, 1945. T o Jay Leyda I owe at least twenty interesting quotations from letters and diaries. The result of his comprehensive research is embodied in his Log-Book of Herman Melville, published in 1951 by Harcourt Brace. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania permits me to quote from * Mrs. Smyth's collection has recently been acquired by the Henry W . and Albert A . Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

PREFACE

ix

a letter of Melville's to Rufus Griswold, December 19, 1851, concerning a Cooper Memorial. I am happy to acknowledge here also my debt to the Harvard College Library for use of the Melville Collection and the Sumner Papers; the N e w York Public Library for much material in the Gansevoort-Lansing and the Duyckinck Collections, and to the Henry W . and Albert A. Berg Collection for permission to quote from their Hawthorne material. Mr. Manning Hawthorne has kindly given me freedom to use any Hawthorne papers in this collection or elsewhere. I am also indebted to the Massachusetts Historical Society for the use of the Shaw papers, the Dana papers, and the Edward Everett papers. The staffs of all these institutions have been uniformly helpful. For answers to questions I submitted to them, I am indebted to the Berkshire Athenaeum, the Lenox Library Association, the Old Dartmouth Historical Society and Whaling Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, the Library of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, and the Queensborough Public Library, Flushing Branch; also to Mr. Robert G. Wheeler, director of the Albany Institute of History and Art, Dr. William B. Van Lennep, curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Mrs. Graham D. Wilcox, librarian of the Stockbridge Library Association, Mrs. Cleever Brown, and Mrs. John O'Conor Sloane. For criticism of the book in process of composition I am grateful to my husband Henry Knight Metcalf; also to Eleanor Hinkley and Mrs. Elise Bailey. T o the editorial department of the Harvard University Press I owe grateful acknowledgment for patient discussion of innumerable details. In conclusion I want to thank Dr. Henry A. Murray for generously sharing with me his own valuable Melville material, gathered over a period of twenty years, during which he has combined an intensive study of Melville with the demands of his own specific work as director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and psychiatrist in the United States army during World W a r II. These deep concerns have carried him into the widest possible fields of inquiry into man's nature, making him an unusual critic of Melville and his social situation. I am indebted to him also for criticism of the manuscript both in an early and a later stage of development. I am most fortunate in having permission to quote two passages from an article by H. M. Tomlinson, "London as Melville Saw It"— one to suggest the limits of this book to a certain cycle, the other to complete this cycle with a question inherent in the subject. Mr. Tomlinson wrote without any knowledge of my book or its purpose. Students of Melville will necessarily find here much that is familiar.

X

PREFACE

What is unfamiliar may simply add some flesh and blood to a literary figure—one who has already led imagination to new visions of the dignity and mystery of life. If the man who moves through these pages, revealed as he is by his contemporaries in his personal relations, stirs the sympathy and commands the respect of its readers, and perhaps leads some to further experience of him, this book will have served its purpose. Cambridge, Massachusetts

ELEANOR M E L V I L L E

METCALF

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION

xiii

1

EMERGENT

1

2

TRITON TRIUMPHANT

3

HERMAN'S

4

LOOMINGS

5

A C R O S S THE A T L A N T I C

6

DEEP P E A L S A N D LIGHT R E V E L R Y

7

WINTER'S S N O W Y

8

HELL, H E A R T H , A N D P I C N I C FIRES

9

AMBIGUITIES A N D A G A T H A

LIZZIE

28 44

56 64

ISOLATION

FEARS A N D F O R M U L A S

11

ESCAPE, N O ESCAPE

159

12

THE P A C I F I C A G A I N

179

13

TO THE C U S T O M H O U S E

14

MALCOLM AND STANWIX

15

BURIED BUT B R E A T H I N G

214

16

TRITON A M O N G

235

17

J E F F E R S O N HILL

18

F R I E N D L Y T O THE F R I E N D L Y

19

RESUMPTION

146

191

STONES

207

247 258

285

I N D E X OF C O R R E S P O N D E N T S INDEX

95

131

10

GENERAL

79

305

299

107

ILLUSTRATIONS Herman Melville. Portrait by Joseph Oriel Eaton, 1870, from the author's collection; on loan to the Houghton Library, Harvard University. The Melville and Gansevoort Families. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. Lemuel Shaw. From the author's collection. Hope Savage Shaw. From the author's collection. John Oakes Shaw. Courtesy of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. Lemuel Shaw, Jr. Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum. Samuel Savage Shaw. From the author's collection. Elizabeth Shaw Melville. From the author's collection; the original is now in the Berkshire Athenaeum. Frances Melville at fifteen. From the author's collection. Malcolm, Bessie, Fanny, and Stanwix Melville. From the author's collection. Malcolm Melville in his National Guard uniform. From the author's collection; the original watercolor is now in the Berkshire Athenaeum. Evert A. Duyckinck. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. George L. Duyckinck. From the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume X (1909). Sarah Morewood. Portrait by Henry Luman, 1861, courtesy of Margaret T. Morewood. Nathaniel Hawthorne. An engraving of the portrait by Cephas G . Thompson. The engraving was given to Herman Melville by Mrs. Hawthorne in 1851, was preserved in the Melville family for many years, and is now in the Berkshire Athenaeum. Sophia Peabody, later Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Portrait, 1830, courtesy of Henry A. Hawthorne. Frances and Elizabeth Melville dressed for the George Washington Ball, 1875. From the author's collection. Eleanor and Frances Thomas. From the author's collection. Henry Besson Thomas. From a tintype, 1883, in the author's collection.

Arrowhead, Melville's Pittsfield home (page 94), is from the Duyckinck«' Cyclopaedia American Literature, Volume II (1856).

of

" O u r peering curiosity is the measure of his mastership. His contribution to the fun of life, and his deepening of its mystery, only quicken interest in his person, and desire to examine his relics for traces of his secrets." H. M. Tomlinson, " L o n d o n a s Melville S a w I t , " John O'London's Weekly, N o v e m b e r 11, 1 9 4 9 .

INTRODUCTION

It has fallen to my lot as the oldest grandchild of Herman Melville to suggest something further of the man behind the printed page, well knowing he would feel this unimportant if he might aspire to the anonymity that best befits an author of the world's enduring literature. Time will take care of that, as the myth he created sinks into human consciousness; but as yet we are too close to one who has come to be recognized as part of the spiritual heritage of the race. There is a growing interest, often curious and puzzled, which it seems to me proper and right to try to satisfy. Though much has been written with strong personal feeling—varied biographical and critical studies, each making its contribution to a developing saga, and as much of the emphasis of these studies has been on the abnormality of heroic genius, this presentation of a human being will give some of the alleviating circumstances of his life in their usual mixture with the common trials of humanity, and some idea of the uncommon sufferings of an uncommon man. If I were to use only the cream of the letters extant, still another one-sided picture would emerge. Most of these are already available. Instead, I shall attempt to meet the increasingly wide interest in Herman Melville by means of the numerous family letters, and other correspondence, that have survived, the records of diaries, the memory of conversations I had from girlhood with those who knew him before I was born, the most important of which were with my grandmother, my mother and father, and my greatuncle Samuel Shaw; and lastly, the legends and anecdotes alive in the family into the twentieth century, which are known to but a few, and most of which have never been published.

INTRODUCTION

The core of the man remains incommunicable: suggestion of his quality is all that is possible. Aiming for this suggestion, I shall sometimes ignore historical sequence for the sake of a more immediate impression; but I have used a general time and place framework for the whole picture. In a closely knit family of the last century the simple day-by-day happenings and the natural expression of emotions that filled the letters of a large family group in a letter-writing age give a vivid impression of their personalities. This family had no more distinction than many another; yet their letters may perform a unique service in providing the intimate social scene in which a man of genius lived and moved, but failed to find his being. Many of these letters, with other valuable records which I shall use, came to me from my grandmother through my mother, Melville's younger daughter, and the only one of his four children to marry. Many others that would have been of inestimable value are lost—destroyed at different times, some by Melville himself, others by members of the family. Some were thought by them to be too personal even for a granddaughter's eyes, as the little packet of her husband's love letters that my grandmother kept with her to the day of her death, and which was destroyed then—whether at her request or not, I shall never learn. Others were burned at later periods, for reasons I can only conjecture (what concerns family history is no outsider's affair, perhaps), the same reason, unquestioned in a Victorian milieu, that deprives Emily Dickinson lovers of precious material. But the Shaws of Boston, the Gansevoorts of Albany, the Duyckincks of N e w York, the Nathaniel Hawthorne family, Richard Bentley the English publisher, and James Billson of Leicester, England, had the historic, or literary, or purely personal sense which has preserved to us the valuable records that still exist. As eloquent a tribute to the simply human quality of the man as has survived is found in the letters of his old shipmates. Many of the letters and documents presented here are those which were entrusted to me by my mother. In 1942, under the impetus of the increasing power of Melville, I was moved to give the bulk of them, with my share of Melville's books, to the Harvard College Library, where they are scrupulously cared for and available to all interested students. Honesty compels me to admit that though it was fun having such men as Harry Murray, Charles Olson, Francis Matthiessen, and many others, come to the house seeking Melville, yet it was partly my feeling of inadequacy in dealing with the problems of the genus "scholar" and partly the burden of caring for my precious possessions that led me to make the gift. N o w add to these written records the stories passed on by Mel-

INTRODUCTION

xvli

ville's contemporaries, kindly or censorious, and childhood memories of the second generation—from such letters and fragments a man and artist as a social being might emerge. If he does not emerge as fully as we may desire, his contemporaries do shed telling light on themselves, and on current modes of thinking and conditions of living. I shall use some letters and diary entries to this end. Melville's stature now makes him the focus of a larger alliance, growing from the spread of his spirit through writings, each perfect or imperfect as work of art, but all, the fruit of unswerving probity and daring veracity. When the cut of his beard, the fit of his coat are forgotten; when what Aunt Mary felt or Uncle Peter thought are lost; when what the man did on a given day or left undone throughout his life are weatherworn as the inscription on his headstone, the fire of his deepest soul will glow from "the dark backward and abysm of time."

Herman Melville CYCLE

AND

EPICYCLE

CHAPTER ONE

EMERGENT Let us take a backward glance at the family of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melville, the father and mother of Herman, through the eyes of fond parents and interested grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Beginning with Gansevoort in 1815, every other year for twelve years a brother or sister was born. Then three years passed before Thomas completed the circle in 1830. So Gansevoort, Helen Maria, Herman, Augusta, Allan, Catherine Gansevoort, Priscilla Frances, and Thomas grew, played, flourished, were sick, recovered, developed according to their several natures and gifts, like all children in a normal family group. Relatives took a lively interest, and duly relayed bits of special news, as Uncle Peter Gansevoort did when he told his mother of three-and-a-half-months-old Herman's astonishing accomplishment of "nearly three teeth." Their parents were hopeful, ill, tired, proud, depressed, ambitious, outgrew their houses, moved, had trouble with servants and high prices, visited, entertained visitors, gave and received presents, took kindly thought of their parents, cared for the sick of each generation—and had all the children baptized in the Reformed Dutch Church. All this in the fluctuating but rapidly expanding commercialism of N e w York, where as early as 1819, the year of Herman's birth, Allan wrote his father, Major Thomas Melville of Boston, "I am neither emulous of riches or distinction, they are both insufficient to ensure happiness, or purchase health, a man may do very well in private life with a mere competency, & if I can only provide for the rational wants of my beloved Wife and children, I shall be content with my lot & bless the hand from which all favors come." He still had faith in "our national Eagle, 'with an eye that never winks & a wing that never tires'"; and he believed that "sound practical honesty, guided by prudence & judgement, will ever prove an overmatch for habitual knavery, though seconded by falsehood & deceit, unless those who sit in judgement on their comparative merits are wilfully blind or woefully ignorant, which can hardly be the case in this land of national liberty, where 'reason is left free to

2

H E R M A N MELVILLE

combat error, & none are above the reach of public opinion.'" Allan added that "the Babe is . . . doing well & is a very promising Child"; but also that "business is absolutely stagnant." When Herman was three, Allan was convinced that "Agriculture, Manufacture & Commerce were born free & equal, like American citizens . . . they form a triple league more formidable than the 'Holy Alliance,' & must flourish or decline together." They could not have been flourishing together through the year 1822, for by November, Allan wrote his brother-in-law that "business at private sale is rather dull, for the Auctions engross more than ever, & injure us most centrally." Apparently it did not seem incongruous to him that "Maria has purchased the Lottery Ticket No 4709 Literature Lottery. It cost $9." Perhaps "taking a chance" offered the only hope in a gloomy picture. In spite of his avowed modest ambitions, by 1822 Allan confessed to his friend Lemuel Shaw of Boston, "I have become in spite of myself exclusively a Man Of Business, & given up books & every thing disconnected with Trade, which in this most industrious of all busy Cities requires unremitted personal attendance, the competition being much greater than you can imagine from your experience among our commercial acquaintance at Boston; . . . thus far I have succeeded beyond my expectations, & find my credit as well established as I could wish; my prospects are good, & with the favour of Providence, & my usual prudence & industry, I have no fear of the result." Allan's growing family and his self-confessed "domestic habits & strong affections," must of necessity have driven him to this selfsacrificing course. Nevertheless, the rigid routine was relaxed occasionally. Maria wrote her brother Peter in December of that year, "the grave & serious Mr Melville [was] altogether unable to controul his risibility" at seeing Charles Mathews, the comedian, in Wild Oats at the Park Theatre. In periods of "good" prospects smaller quarters on Pearl Street were exchanged first for a house on Courtlandt Street, and again for a house on Bleecker Street, which offered pleasant out-door play space for children, and more commodious rooms for social life. Nearby lower Broadway was "upper" socially, in spite of the fact that "large spaces of unimproved property intervened between the buildings on either side of Broadway, and pigs still wandered in the streets." It is not strange that Asiatic cholera and yellow fever were periodic visitors. On April 8, 1823, Allan wrote his brother-in-law, Peter Gansevoort of Albany, after the birth of young Allan, "The children are all well & in ecstacies with the young Stranger whom they would fain have to play with them in the Garret already. Herman says 'Pa now got two

EMERGENT

3

ittle Boys' & Master Gansevoort who is given to ratiocination, having asked whence he came, & being told I had purchased him from the Doctor, observed with great indignation that 'he never heard of buying Children except for Slaves'—Miss Helen Maria says 'if Pa has many more children he will have to keep the rod in hand the whole time,' & the Lady Augusta though somewhat jealous in disposition, smiles on the Baby with ineffable delight." The Melvilles decided not to go to Albany for a visit with the Gansevoorts during the summer of 1823 unless the fever returned. But by July there were several cases on Staten Island. By August the heat was extreme, but all the family were well. However, it was decided that Maria and the children should take refuge from the heat and possible spread of the fever under the hospitable roof of Uncle Peter, who in early October still had charge of his nieces and nephews. "I hope you keep my Boys in good order," wrote Allan October 4, "& occasionally overlook the young Ladies. I depend much on your kind & judicious attention to them—Uncle Peter though a very great favorite with these blooming cherubs, will I trust ever prove an invaluable useful Friend, whose love transcends indulgence, & who will rather consider their future welfare, than present enjoyment." By the middle of the month the family were at home again, and Allan could gratefully report that Maria and the children are "in charming health & spirits, though Herman [who had been ill] has not entirely recovered his plump and rosy appearance, he however laughs & plays & eats & sleeps as formerly." The winter of 1823-24 proved to be one of those that will occur in large families: Allan ill for five weeks; everyone sick at some time —Gansevoort with a severe cough; Herman, pale, thin, and dejected— and to add to the general misery, visiting Aunt Priscilla Melville was laid up for three months with rheumatic fever, and the servants were "successively subjected to the effects of extra labor and violent colds." The others were comparatively well, and plans were being made to move to the larger house on Bleecker Street. Maria was pleased. She wrote Peter in March that the house had "a yard about one hundred feet by 26—With Grass Plot and flower beds . . . the Prospect extensive & pleasant . . . Those elegant white Marble Houses in Bond Street—& also in Broadway present themselves to the View from the back windows & the Bowery—Marble Mantle Pieces—& Grates for Lehigh Coal—a smaller quantity of which gives more heat & leaves less Ashes than the Liverpool." April found the family in usual health; and by May, Maria, an invaluable Miss Adams, the children, and a nurse, left for a five weeks' visit to the hospitable Gansevoorts in Albany while Allan settled un-

4

HERMAN

MELVILLE

impeded into the new house. Allan seems to have had some compunctions about sending his entire family—wife, five children, and two attendants—to visit; but moving is moving, and families exist for mutual assistance, and what is a man to do under the circumstances, he seems to say. He knew he could count on the Gansevoorts, who were never slow to acknowledge their obligations. So he must have been sincerely relieved when he wrote to Peter two weeks after their departure: "I rejoice that the health & spirits of our good Mother & yourself should have been benefitted by the society of our dear Maria and sweet Children, especially as we entertained serious misgivings as to the propriety of ushering such a numerous train upon your indulgent reception. I however hope the children will not prove troublesome, & that all parties will be mutually pleased with the visit." On one occasion, in April 1818, when Allan, planning a business trip to Europe, entrusted his family to his brother-in-law's "kind and judicious attention," Peter gave evidence that his love indeed "transcended indulgence" in some particularly vigorous manner. Did the deputy father take the proverbial rod in hand, feeling warranted by his strong family affection? He wrote: "Your Maria and children are all in excellent health & Maria is entitled to great credit for the mental fortitude which she has displayed during your absence. Gansevoort's deportment is greatly improved.—The effects of your too great indulgence have in great measure been corrected—He passed the ordeal with dignity and grandeur, often erroneously mistaken in a child for a perverse & contradictory spirit—He sustained a consistency throughout which justifies me in giving (what all men have not) character to the boy. I fear that I have incurred your displeasure, in having accepted his homage of superior respect, for he says that he loves me more than he does his father—I have however yielded to your injunction & have endeavored to impress him with the truth that you are his liege lord . . . "The objects more dear to me on earth are now within these walls —My widowed aged and afflicted mother and my only Sister & her precious children—They are by nature entitled to my Guardian care and protection—by their own loveliness & merit to my kind and respectful attention by the adoption of my heart to its tenderest feeling and most affectionate love—and by circumstance they claim the performance of duties the pledge of nature—and call into lively exercise those feelings most congenial with my soul—accept the promise Gansevoort will ever protect your Maria & her children." The end of the year 1824, after a trying summer when Maria, according to Allan, needed "exercise and ease," she wrote her brother Peter about the children: "Gansevoort was confined to the house part

EMERGENT

5

of last week with a Fever, He grows very fast & does not look so robust & hearty as formerly—Herman and Augusta improve apace as to growing and talking—The former attends school regularly but does not appear so fond of his Book as to injure his Health—He has turned into a great tease, & daily puts Gansevoort's Patience to flight—who cannot bear to be 'plagued by such a little Fellow.'" This letter followed a gift of five hundred oysters to her mother: "The oysters I pickled on the same day for our own use are of an excellent flavor and altho not very large are the same which some of our Stylish Neighbors in Bond Street gave at a large Party of Fashionables." Early in February 1825 Uncle Herman of Gansevoort, New York, Maria's other brother, visited the family and found them all "in excellent health and spirits." Allan, as merchant importer of French dry goods and notions, was active in the business of what he called "this greatest universal Mart in the World," and Maria occasionally showed the "low spirits," "natural to her delicate condition," before the birth of Catherine. When the baby was between three and four weeks old, a relative could report Maria as "perfectly well . . . but [the perversity of domestics] produces that most terrible of all diseases to which she is subject—i.e. it makes her nervous"—so much so that Maria herself later reported that she had feared for her "strength of mind & Body." And Maria had been missing social pleasures in Albany—which perhaps added to her nervousness. What daughter would not have relished being present when General LaFayette and his suite called on her widowed mother, out of respect to the memory of her father, the Revolutionary defender of Fort Stanwix, General Peter Gansevoort? The year passed: the family survived a winter and spring of influenza, croup, and scarlet fever—Herman among those to suffer the last. The summer of 1826 again saw a scattering to visits. Allan announced to Peter on August 9 his plans for another summer's vacations: "I shall probably dispatch Master Gansevoort to Boston on Saturday to pass the vacation—& in addition to little Herman who serves as Pioneer you will probably in due time be favoured with the appearance of Maria, Miss Helen Maria & the infanta Catherine—Miss Augusta & Master Allan and nurse will probably remain with me as campers & companions." Herman with Walker, a man-servant, "will probably embark in the James Kent at 5 P.M." Allan followed this letter with another, surely one of the most curious ever written about a seven-year-old child: " I wrote you yesterday explanatory of Walker's detention, under whose immediate charge, I now consign to your especial care & patronage, my beloved Son Herman, an honest hearted double rooted Knickerbocker of the true Albany stamp, who I trust will do equal honour in due time to

6

H E R M A N MELVILLE

his ancestry parentage & Kindred—he is very backward in Speech & somewhat slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men & things both solid & profound, 8c of a docile & amiable disposition—if agreeable he will pass the vacation with his Grandmother & yourself, & I hope he may prove as pleasant auxiliary to the Family Circle—I depend much on your kind attention to my dear Boy who will be truly grateful for the least favour—let him avoid green Fruit & unseasonable exposure to the Sun & heat, but having taken such good care of Gansevoort last Summer, I commit his Brother to the same hands with unreserved confidence—Have the goodness to procure a pair of Shoes for Herman, time being insufficient to have a pair made here." Vacations over, in mid-September Allan wrote his brother-in-law: " W e expect Gansevoort on Sunday, at fartherest, when we wish Herman also to be here, that they may recommence their studies together on Monday next, with equal chances of preferment, & without any feelings of jealousy or ideas of favoritism—besides they may thus acquire a practical moral lesson whose influence may endure forever, for if they understand early, that inclination must always yield to Duty, it will become a matter of course when the vacations expire, to bid a fond adieu to Friends & amusements, & return home cheerfully to their Books, & they will consequently imbibe habits of Order & punctuality . . ." Allan added that "Business is about as dull & unprofitable as the most bitter foe to general prosperity, if such a being exists in human shape, could desire it, & it requires a keener vision than mine to discern . . . any real symptoms of future improvement." This unfortunate state he attributed to modern labor-saving inventions. On Herman's return, his father wrote a letter which in his best high-flown manner expostulated against an evident outburst of Peter Gansevoort's explosive temper. The pompous language succeeded in veiling, without hiding, Allan's feelings of resentment: with the result that relations with the Gansevoorts continued unbroken. Allan wrote September 26, 1826: "Dear Gansevoort: Your letters of the 15th & 16 inst are on file unanswered, the first however being a severe tirade or phillipic against two of the gentler sex, both prodigious favourites of mine & one of them in my eyes at least "a seeming Paragon," my own lovely wedded wife, your only beloved Sister, you will permit me in comity to glance over with a dry acknowledgement, which must not however be construed into a tacit acquiescence in its propriety, for nothing legal in the whole course of your practice, in fact or argument, could have been more manifestly improper as it regards the aforesaid fair Ladies, & in this case as Counsellor, silence must in no wise be tortured by

EMERGENT

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law logic or professional ingenuity into consent, which it by no means implies, and I do here most solemnly protest, & beg you would enter the plea on your official record, against the injustice & indecorousness of a most outrageous fulmination, which nothing could extenuate, but your being uncourteously arrested on your way to dinner, which however unpalatable to you, was a palliative to the Ladies, & the only thing which saved your b a c o n — "The 2d Letter was forwarded by Master Herman, who returned home at rather an unreasonable hour, (for we were all in bed) but much improved in mind Person & estate, thanks to the guardian care of his dear Grandmother & Uncle for which he seems very grateful & for whom he displays the most affectionate attachment—Gansevoort also derived many advantages from his jaunt to Boston, where he apparently conducted himself with as much propriety & gained as many budding honors as Herman at Albany—they both resumed their seats the next morning at the High School refreshed & enlivened by a joyous & happy vacation—Gansevoort was immediately appointed one of the six monitors General, having long been a Frank [?], & has since been promoted to the senior department, has commenced the study of French & become a Monitor in Geography, in which branch he is a distinguished proficient for his age—but notwithstanding the superior pretensions of years & learning, chastens Allan who entertains an utter disregard for age & a profound contempt for classical attainments, is however the cock of the walk among them, he is even of those sturdy champions, who bear down all opposition by the mere force of dogmatic will, arguments are straws with him & he scorns to reason on any subject,—have his way he must, at least with his brothers & his friend Billy, whose only safety is retreat to his own territories, it is in vain to oppose him, for resistance only renders him more formidable —but with me it is otherwise as Maria M knows, he may at times rebel against authority & resist wholesome discipline but yields to threats, or is vanquished by entreaty, & is so entirely submissive, that with a large bolster between us, he has become what I expected he never would after the failure of various expedients, a peaceable bedfellow— on the whole, my three boys behave & promise well, of the three Girls, you will judge yourself, but I fear you will find my gentle Catherine comparatively a stranger to you, occasionally a very vixen, at least to the Nurse, when out of humour with her, or in a wayward mood . . ." The boys returned to a rigorous regime. Allan kept close watch on his sons: when they were not in school they were confined to the house except for visits to his office. N o playing in the streets for them. This was perhaps a wise health measure in those days of recurring Asiatic fevers; but I suspect other reasons also motivated Allan's ruling, reasons

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of social propriety which he shared with the rising merchant class of the city. New York, rapidly expanding; Albany, staid but growing; Uncle Thomas Melville's rural Pittsfield; Uncle John DeWolf's Bristol, Rhode Island, still open to farms; Boston, city of universal intelligence (according to Maria)—these were the chief geographical scenes and influences in the children's life. Beyond this, the world was enlarged in their imagination by the travels of their father, their Uncle John DeWolf, and their two Midshipmen cousins. England, Scotland, France, Russia, and the West Indies thus were more than names to them. And the foreign sights of the two great seaports added color to family tales of the far and strange: a rich experience to keen young children. By December 1826 Allan was forced to ask Peter for a loan of three or four thousand dollars to carry him through the winterthough he claimed to have "expectations." And again the following February he felt the need of applying to Peter; this time for a loan of $10,000 for a project "on which myself, & those dear ones around me both now & hereafter depend," he said. He added that if Peter should disappoint him, "I shall know not whither in this World to turn for succor in the very crisis of my fate." Peter advanced the loan and was fulsomely thanked; but by the end of March $5,000 more was asked of him "in the most urgent manner." This too Peter sent. Family life went on. How much did Maria and the children know of their precarious affairs? One would think not much: all seemed well. On February 15, 1827, the Melville children had given a party, to which twenty-five came in spite of bad weather. Violin playing was the greatest attraction. Food was heartily consumed: "Lemonade Port Wine . . . & cakes of various kinds . . . sugar Plums, mottoes, Blomange, preserves, Oranges & dried fruits." Herman was between seven and eight years old. In his eighth year Herman was introduced to the problems of pedagogy! He had become a monitor at the New York Male High School run on the "Lancastrian System," considered "progressive": flogging only for the severest cases, the honor system in use, a variety of subjects, no religious teaching (but a chapter of the Bible read daily), and boy jurors. Since there were six hundred pupils and one teacher to forty, monitors among the boys were indeed needed. Herman was "responsible for the conduct and behavior of his little class, as well as for their attention and progress." In the summer of 1827 Herman was given a chance to acquire merit in Boston, where he spent the vacation with his Melville grandparents and laid the foundation of his reputation as "an uncommon good Boy, & . . . great favorite with us

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all," though "more sedate" and "less bouyant in mind" than his brother Gansevoort. When he returned, there was a new sister in the house— Priscilla Frances (whose name was later reversed to Frances Priscilla by her father), born in August. The following February, Allan wrote Peter Gansevoort the family news: "You will be as much surprised as myself to know, that Herman proved the best Speaker in the introductory Department of the High School, he has made rapid progress during the last 2 quarters—& Gansevoort still ranks among the A s N o 1 in the senior class—Helen Maria is now at Mrs. Whielder & is a very smart but rather indolent Scholar, & the two Boys with Augusta attend Dancing there twice a week— the latter is esteemed a very Sylph for a beginner—& Gansevoort is said to have so much natural grace (by his fair teacher Miss Whielder) as to neglect his feet too much in the regular steps." At eight Herman had evidently overcome the slowness of speech his father had reported two years before. His ease was perhaps due to the dramatic command of an audience, which was in the future so often to impress others in lectures and story-telling, down to his two older granddaughters. As if to favor Allan and the growth of his family, the gods of finance smiled on the beginning of 1828. Peter was informed by him that he had made "a confidential connexion with the highly respectable general Commission House of Messrs L P De Luze & Co in the Dry Goods branch of their Business of a nature at once safe pleasant & encouraging, which will afford me a liberal compensation for my services & a certain support for my family during the present year." With so much hope, in February he could lease a house at 675 Broadway "for 5 years @ $575 without Taxes—being the 2d beyond the Marble Buildings & nearly opposite Bond Street . . . the lot is 200 feet deep, through to Mercer St. Maria is charmed with the House & situation, and I trust our good Mother & yourself will be equally pleased with them." Though parents do not enjoy the excitements and confusion of moving, children seem to. The little Melvilles had their fill of both in May when the family crowded into 675 Broadway to crowd the workmen out. Their father described the scene in a graphic letter, written May 10, to his brother-in-law: " W e have been at N o 675 Broadway since the 30th Ulti", but the Painters, white washers, purifiers &c still keep us in a most distressing confusion of which you may have an idea, when told that Maria, myself & our 7 bairns have passed the last two nights in the same chamber, Gansevoort & Herman on one side of our Bed, & Helen Maria & Augusta on the other, all in elegant negligence on the floor—Allan & Catherine point to point at the two

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extremes of a cot in a snug corner, & Miss Frances Priscilla on the right flank in a cradle—surrounded on all sides by a maze of furniture belonging to this & the other Rooms which are painting." But alas, only two months later the bright news of house and family went out in the confession that "business in general is dull & money still scarce . . . Our dear Maria intended to employ this morning on the long promised Letter, which will doubtless contain a full account of domestic concerns, although her antipathy to writing seems almost insurmountable." Herman had but lately rounded out his ninth year, and was back in school after a pleasant summer visit to his Uncle John and Aunt Mary DeWolf in Bristol, Rhode Island, when he wrote his Grandmother Gansevoort the third letter of his life, and the only one of the first three to survive: "Dear Grandmother: This is the third letter that I ever wrote so you must not think it very good. I now study geography, grammar, writing, Speaking, Spelling, and read in the Scientific class book. I enclose in this letter a drawing for my dear Grandmother. Give my love to grandmamma, Uncle Peter and Aunt Mary. And my Sisters and also to allan, Your affectionate Grandson, Herman Melville." Once more, and for the last time, the family received a new addition: Thomas was born on January 24, 1830. Their old family friend, Lemuel Shaw of Boston, visited the Melvilles a month later, and found them all flourishing. And May 20 Allan reported the cheerful news of his children to their Grandfather Melville in Boston: " M y dear Father: I shall endeavour to make you a visit about the 4th July, & perhaps bring along whom you have not seen—Gansevoort is looking forward to pass his vacation at Boston with much pleasure, he is becoming a distinguished classical scholar at the Grammar School, & is at the head of the Class in most of the English studies, but I fear is growing too fast for his health— "Helen Maria also ranks very high at school, her natural talents are of the first order but like most young Girls she is rather giddy, & wants application, but still she contrives to keep up with the best & is seldom at fault in her lessons—Herman I think is making more progress than formerly, & without being a bright Scholar, he maintains a respectable standing, & would proceed further, if he could be induced to study more—being a most amiable & innocent child, I cannot find it in my heart to coerce him, especially as he seems to have chosen Commerce as a favorite pursuit, whose practical activity can well dispense with much book knowledge— "Augusta is life and motion, but not much of a student, she has however danced herself into notice, for with scarce 2 quarters tuition,

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she was pronounced by her master the most elegant Dancer at his last Ball— "So much my dear Father for 4 of your Grandchildren, the others are too young to attract attention or disclose character, although Allan has a memory of Brass 8c is said to have his full share of mother wit >>

But Maria's domestic burdens were heavy, and the shadow of constant debt hung over her head. T o live so near to the marble houses of Bond Street, and to be unable to share their opulent life added social frustration to domestic pressures. By August, Allan, who had begun borrowing from his father, confessed to his brother-in-law Peter, that her "spirits are occasionally more than ever depressed, while the family requires extraordinary attention, & unless she soon obtains relief from mental excitement, by some favorable change in our condition & prospects, I fear that her health will suffer permanent injury—she is very desirous of removing to Albany, to enjoy once more the society of her connexions & friends and feels at home & if possible happy, which she never can be here, Herman is much disappointed with regard to his visit to Hadley but bears it like a Philosopher." There was reason enough for depression: Allan had met with total financial collapse. That autumn Maria had her wish for removal from a too difficult New York. Allan established his family in their new home at Market and Steuben Streets, Albany, soon to be followed by more commodious quarters in a better neighborhood at No. 3 Clinton Square. The children's life went on normally. The boys entered the Albany Academy, where "Our peculiar mode of education always aims to qualify youth for the business pursuits of active life. Practical combined with moral education, is the primary law of our Institution; and to that everything else is either considered subordinate, or made to be subservient." Birching was frequent. It was indeed "a Godfearing school." The Albany Female Academy received the girls. While Herman distinguished himself in the writing of themes, and surprisingly enough won a prize for "Ciphering," Augusta made her mark in writing also. Her compositions exhibited a serious, religious nature that dwelt on suffering, reverence for the Sabbath, the character of Christ, sincerity in those who mourn—all expressed with delicacy of feeling. She could write too on such a playful subject as the "History of a Hat." One could wish she had had poetry of a higher quality than that of Mrs. Hemans to study. Even of that, she noticed that the images "are not merely placed there for ornament, but they possess a full decided meaning." Some of the financial gloom was temporarily dispelled, though

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Allan continued borrowing from his father. In December 1830 he wrote desperately: "I am destitute of resources & without a shilling— without immediate assistance I know not what will become of me, but $500 would save me from a world of trouble, & enable me to look forward with renewed hope, in expectation of being afterwards able to support myself—which repeated hopes & disappointments have prevented me from doing." His father responded by advancing $3500. This man who had come to such a pass in his private affairs, had years before expressed his political faith and doubts in the letter to his friend Lemuel Shaw which follows. As early as 1804 he confessed to a state of fluctuating emotions that seem never to have become more stabilized. Such a condition must have exerted a strong influence on his growing children. Throughout life Herman breathed unhappily "the dust of parties," but was untempted by more autocratic forms of government. ". . . It has ever been my opinion," Allan wrote, "that Self Interest is in general the great predominative principle of human actions, on this are founded the projects of the Politician, & the professions of the would be thought Patriot; in all ages, & in all Countries, personal aggrandizement has been the main object, & the doctrines of the ins & outs once so well understood, are now lost sight of amid the dust of Parties,—when men of judgement entertain opinions diametrically opposite, mutual respect leads them to court an approach, by a liberal & calm discussion of the subject in dispute, but when a multitude is divided upon the abstract points of Religion or Politics, bigotry & obstinacy bear away, & overule the 'still small voice' of reason . . . Under all free governments the freedom of the Press degenerates into licentiousness, indiscriminate abuse takes the place of wholesome advice, & the sources of publick information become poluted—It is easy to direct, but it is difficult to control the voice of the People—popular favour is sought with avidity, it is often readily attained, & as frequently lost in a moment—In a representative government, it sometimes happens that the worst characters are elected to offices of trust & honour—By artful misrepresentations the best measures are made to appear bad—The rulers of a free people are too often abused by the malignant clamours of the envious & the disappointed, & the governed are easily led to ascribe bad motives to the conduct of those invested with authority.—Republics have universally been stigmatized with the crime of ingratitude, when they ought to have been reproached with credulity.—The above observations trite as they may appear, naturally arose in reflecting on the situation of our Country, many more might have been made, but were left for the suggestions of the better informed reader, while I do not hesitate to declare that of all publick

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systems of government, the republican appears to me the best, this form is the most congenial to our natures, & is highly honourable to our characters, & when righteously administered is capable of affording us the greatest degrees of happiness and security." Maria's thoughts during the trying period of Allan's financial difficulties were on her children's futures. In August of 1830 she had written her brother Peter a suggestive letter concerning the apple of her eye, Gansevoort: ". . . the two learned Gentlemen who saw G at Harvard university two years since when he was taken there by one of his Cousins askd particularly about him, they admired his intelligence & questions—if G is noticed in Boston where every lad is intelligent— we should do much to preserve, foster, & increase" his natural gifts. But hopes and ambitions for a brilliant future for Maria's eldest vanished with the new year. In early January 1832 Allan, exhausted, fell ill of a fever, accompanied by a toxic delirium, from which he never recovered. An unfortunate letter written January 10 by Peter Gansevoort, calling Allan's brother Thomas to the bedside of "a deranged man," and another, written by Thomas to Lemuel Shaw five days later, reporting that if Allan lived he would in all probability "live a Maniac/" are responsible in their ignorance for an idea accepted most unhappily as fact in the family circle and repeated widely elsewhere. His wife simply said, " M y dear Allan by reason of severe suffering was deprived of his intellect." On January 28, 1832, Allan was dead, crushed by a life of burdens he was unequal to, temperamentally or intellectually, victim of his own dependent nature and the uncontrolled, little understood fluctuations of commerce in a rapidly growing city. The hard, stubborn facts revealed themselves, and fear struggled with pride in Maria's heart. Gansevoort and Herman left school and went to work. It was not all child labor during the next five years; but it was five years of varying fortunes. Gansevoort's cap and fur store, an enterprise his father had set up before his death, flourished, then failed. Herman clerked in the New York State Bank, of which his Uncle Peter was a director, worked for his brother, helped his Uncle Thomas on his farm, and taught school in Pittsfield. In the summer of 1832 Maria and her children fled to Uncle Thomas' Pittsfield farm to escape an epidemic of Asiatic cholera; but Maria sent Herman back to work after five days, in spite of danger, for her brother Peter demanded it. She was worried about her son's health—and his handwriting. She wrote Peter, "Herman I have not heard of since he left us at Pittsfield—I hope he is with you, & made to occupy his time when out of the Bank in reading, & writing to me."

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Whether Uncle Peter made his nephew write thus strictly to his mother is not known; but write he did. On August 7, Maria, by way of Peter, sent her "best love to Herman . . . his last letter was much praised for its superiority over the first, the hand writing particularly, he1 must practise often, & daily." The next day his sister, Helen Maria, added her reproach to his mother's praise. Though "surrounded by cousins . . . no less than 17 children" altogether, she could find time to write to her Uncle Peter: "I am sorry that my brother Herman cannot find time to answer my last." Maria was worried about her brother also and wrote to Peter from Pittsfield on July 14: "Do my dear Brother leave Albany if this weather continues, for you are the only person or Brother I should say, that I and mine have to depend upon for all things, yours is a valuable Life & not to be trifled with, my dear Allan often used to say—'Maria you love Peter better than me or your Children,' & I can assure you his Death has not made me love you less—you are everything to me—& for my sake take care of yourself." That autumn Grandfather Melville, the old major, died. What affection Maria may have had for her father-in-law she does not disclose. It is not surprising that feeling ran high among his descendants when they discovered that he had counted all his past, and all possible future, loans to Allan as debts against his estate—and that this was done at Allan's suggestion, which (if Maria knew it) must have complicated her emotions badly. But she had only to remind herself of Allan's ever hopeful temperament to exonerate him. Poor unfortunate, proud Maria! When the full implications of this arrangement made themselves felt, she wrote in June 1833 to her husband's old friend, Lemuel Shaw, complaining bitterly of the "utter desertion" of her children by their Melville relatives—who indeed had little to spare, and many claims on that. But Maria was bowed by her own troubles, which loomed enormous. The good man gave her warm sympathy and promises of help; the following February he wrote: "I trust, Mrs. Melville, I need not reiterate my strong assurances, to convince you of the deep interest & solicitude I feel in the welfare of your children, and the children of one of my oldest & best friends. I hope I feel the same solicitude for them, which I am sure he would feel for mine under the change of circumstances. I shall at all times & under all circumstances, do all in my power, to promote their best interests. I feel extreme regret, that there has been either in appearance or reality, any want of frank & cordial good understanding among the connexions of this family; and I trust, if it has been felt, it has been owing to some unfortunate misapprehension."

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Allan's children turned to their father's old friend instinctively, not for financial aid alone. In this bitter year of 1834, Helen Maria, seventeen years old, sought Lemuel Shaw's sympathetic advice on the subject of a proposed marriage and addressed him piteously, if not without some self-pity too, as "my best earthly friend, now that in the Providence of God I am left an orphan! a lonely sojourner in this cold, calculating world!" Gansevoort now felt an added responsibility. With a single will and determination, who could not succeed? He recorded his ideas on making money in his journal, January 5, 1834: " T o make money, it only requires a cool dispassionate disposition joined with talents even below mediocrity, and a determination to sacrifice every inclination and feeling that may come in contact with it." T w o months later he confessed a conflicting ambition: "Let us for a moment consider the advantage which a highly cultivated understanding, the possession of extensive stores of useful knowledge and unerring judgement, and the power of clear strong & conclusive reasoning will give a man; it will raise him above his fellows, it will make him their leader, in a word it will give him power—and with some minds the possession of power is in fact the possession of happiness." His sense of a worried responsibility for his younger brothers he also revealed in his journal entry for March 7: "This afternoon at Vi after 3 o'clock started for Schenectady . . . I was very much surprised to meet brother Herman in the bar-room at Davis' in company with Frederick Leake, and at first could not imagine the reason of his being there, but on reflection saw that the bank must have sent them over, on enquiring I found my opinion confirmed. They came over in the afternoon car and were unable to return that eve'g there being no cars." What of Herman? Uncle Thomas Melville in Pittsfield took him for his vacation in 1833. And at some time, now or earlier, he had found life in the world of books. Cooper's works, he wrote many years later, were "among the earliest I remember, as in my boyhood producing a vivid and awakening power upon my mind." He and Gansevoort were members of an organization that cherished "a taste for literary pursuits"—the Albany Young Men's Association for Mutual Improvement, whose dues of fifty cents a quarter were not always easy to meet, but were always paid eventually. The Albany Classical School, where Herman continued his education in 1835 while working part time in his brother's cap and fur store, attempted to "secure the two great ends of education; the cultivation of the intellect and the formation of character under the influence of the Christian religion." But preparation for business careers

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was not neglected. Herman was evidently allowed to get his in extracurricular activity. Then in 1836, according to Herman's memoir of Thomas Melville published in Smith's History of Pittsfield, "circumstances made me the greater portion of a year an inmate of my uncle's family, and an active assistant upon the farm." That was a happy year with Uncle Thomas: Herman fitted into the genial atmosphere of the household. Shabby gentility and honest manual labor was a combination that did not repel him; and the romantic past (Thomas Melville had made and lost a fortune in Paris in his youth) and instinctive refinement of his uncle he found appealing. In his memoir, Herman described his uncle with affection: "He was then grey, but not wrinkled; of a pleasing complexion, but little, if any, bowed in figure; and preserving evident traces of the prepossessing good looks of his youth. "His manners were mild and kindly, with a faded brocade of old French breeding, which—contrasted with his surroundings at the time —impressed me as not a little interesting, nor wholly without a touch of pathos. "He never used the scythe, but I frequently raked with him in the hay field. At the end of the swath he would at times pause in the sun, and taking out his smooth-worn box of satinwood, gracefully help himself to a pinch of snuff, partly leaning on the slanted rake, and making some little remark, quite naturally, and yet with a look, which—as I recall it—presents him in the shadowy aspect of a courtier of Louis X V I , reduced as a refugee, to humble employment in a region far from the gilded Versailles . . . "By the late October fire, on the great hearth of the capacious kitchen of the old farm mansion, I remember to have seen him frequently sitting just before early bed time, gazing into the embers, while his face plainly expressed to a sympathetic observer, that his heart, thawed to the core under the influence of the genial flame—carried him far away over the ocean to the gay boulevards. "Suddenly, under the accumulation of reminiscences, his eye would glisten and become humid. With a start he would check himself in his reverie, and give an ultimate sigh; as much as to say, 'Ah well' and end with an aromatic pinch of snuff. It was the French graft upon the N e w England stock, which produced this autumnal apple; perhaps the mellower for the frost." Thomas' beautiful French wife, Françoise Raymonde Eulogie Marie des Douleurs Lamé Fleury, had been dead twenty-two years, and only three of her children survived; but young Herman had the companionship of a large family of "all American" cousins, the children of his

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uncle's second wife, Mary A. A. Hobart. This gentle man, father of many children, one-time president of the Berkshire Agricultural Society and adjudged "the best farmer in Berkshire County," nevertheless, like his brother Allan, incurred overwhelming debts. Only fifteen years before this summer of 1836 he had sadly written to his brother from a debtor's cell, eighteen by twelve feet, that possibly his "sensibillity" had become "morbid." He had felt insulted because Allan had sent him a pound of snuff after eighty-three days of imprisonment. He would "never reveal his troubles" to Allan, yet he was still "Your wounded, but affectionate brother." It is not surprising that after the country-wide financial panic in the spring of 1837, combined with Gansevoort's bankruptcy and fourteenyear-old Allan's efforts to earn in his uncle's law office, Herman was more attracted by the idea of teaching school in Pittsfield than of following Gansevoort's unsuccessful venture in trade—in spite of the fact that as a little boy his father reported him to be entirely interested in "commerce." Moreover, Gansevoort had fallen ill, and Maria's creditors descended upon her. So to Pittsfield Herman went. The little schoolhouse in the Sykes District under Washington Mountain became the scene of the following letter to his Uncle Peter, written December 31, 1837. Except for his description of the scene, human and natural, the eighteen-year-old Melville's style gives, no inkling of future powers, but it does show a great indifference to spelling. " M y dear Uncle: At my departure from Albany last fall with Robert you expressed a desire that I should write you when my school should have gone into operation,—but, when in a few weeks I again returned, you did not repeat your request; still, however, I consider my promise binding—& it is with pleasure that I now proceed to redeem it. "I should have taken up my pen at an earlier day had not the variety & importance of the duties incident to my vocation been so numerous and pressing, that they absorbed a large portion of my time. "But now, having become somewhat acquainted with the routine of business,—having established a systim in my mode of instruction,— and being familiar with the charectars & dispositions of my schollars: in short, having brought my school under a proper organization—a few intervals of time are offorded me, which I improve by occasional writting & reading. " M y scholars are about thirty in number, of all ages, sizes, ranks, characters, & education; some of them who have attained the age of eighteen can not do a sum in addition, while others have travelled through the Arithmatic; but with so great swiftness that they can not

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recognize objects in the road on a second journey; & are about as ignorant of them as though they had never passed that way before. " M y school is situated in a remote & secluded part of the town about five miles from the village, and the house at which I am now boarding is a mile and a half from any tenement whatever—being located on the summit of as savage and lonely a mountain as I ever ascended. The scenery however is most splendid & unusual, embracing an extent of country in the form of an Amphitheatre sweeping around for many miles & encircling a portion of your state in its compass. "The man with whom I am now domicilated is a perfect embodiment of the traits of Yankee character,—being shrewd bold & indépendant, carrying himself with a genuine republican swagger, as hospitable as 'mine host' himself, perfectly free in the expression of his sentiments, and would as soon call you a fool or a scoundrel, if he thought so— as, button up his waistcoat.—He has reard a family of nine boys and three girls, 5 of whom are my pupils—and they all burrow together in the woods—like so many foxes. "The books you presented me (and for which I am very grateful) I have found of eminent usefulness, particularly John C. Taylors 'District School'—an admirable production by the by, which if generally read is calculated to exert a powerful influence and one of the most salutary & beneficial charactar.— " I have given his work a diligent and attentive perusal: and am studying it, to the same advantage,—which a scholar traveling in a country—peruses its hystory,—being surrounded by the scenes it describes. "I think he has treated his theme in a masterly manner, and displays that thorough knowledge of his subject—which is only to be obtained by Experience. "Had he been perfectly familiar with the circumstances of this school,—the difficultys under which it labours, and in short with every thing pertaining to it,—he could not have sketched it in a more graphic manner, than he has, in his description of the style in which schools of this species are genneraly conducted. "Intimatly am I acquainted with the prevalence of those evils which he alledges to exist in Common-Schools. "Orators may declaim concerning the universally-diffused blessings of education in our Country, And Essayests may exhaust their magazine of adj [ectives] in extolling our systim of common school instruction,— but when reduced to practise, the high and sanguine hopes excited by its imposing appearance in theory—are a little dashed,— "Mr Taylor has freely pointed out its defects, and has not been deterred from reproving them, by any feelings of delicacy—If he had,

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he would have proved a traitor to the great cause, in which he is engaged.—But I have almost usurped the province of the Edinburgh Review—so as I am approaching the confines of my sheet I will subscribe myself "Your affectionate nephew Herman Melville. " M y love to Aunt Mary, & a kiss to Henry—Remember me to Uncle Herman. H M." The country's financial depression deepened. Even Uncle Peter was short of funds. Maria was desperately unhappy. It was absolutely necessary to find cheaper living quarters. Lansingburgh—a small village ten miles north of Albany—offered them. There in May 1838 they found a house on River Street, corner of North. Maria had a cousin two blocks away; and Herman's Aunt Mary Gansevoort and his cousins, Guert, Leonard, and Catherine, were just across the river in Waterford. Maria owed for flour in June; but she asked Peter for one hundred dollars the same month, so that her landlord would put up blinds. Peter spoke plainly on the extravagance of blinds, but sent the money. Then Maria was compelled to borrow for coal and winter stores. And Gansevoort, her main support, was still an invalid. Herman, who had gone to Pittsfield once more, visited them in August. By October Gansevoort was better, and consequently "less irritable and capable of more self command," but was as yet unready for work. The Lansingburgh Academy, which stressed integrity of character and preparation for success in business, offered courses in surveying and engineering. Herman studied these. He was nearly twenty the following spring; and in the opinion of Mr. Maltbee, his teacher, he had well earned a certificate and was justified in seeking employment from the Erie Canal Commissioners. The once jeeringly nicknamed "Clinton's Ditch" was now fourteen years old and kept a body of engineers occupied with its growth and welfare. Uncle Peter wrote to Colonel Bouck, one of the commissioners, in April 1839, asking whether a position in the engineering department might be obtained for his nephew, who "would prefer a subordinate station, as he wishes to be advanced only by his own merit." But it was all to no avail. Next month Maria wrote Peter asking for money, and said, "Herman has gone out for a few days on foot to see what he can find to do," and added that "Gansevoort feels well enough to go about, & will leave for N e w York in a f e w days." Yet she felt it necessary to keep a servant she could not pay, her wages being half the rent. The day had not come when she was to be "energetic about the farm" in Pittsfield, and when her daughters would all lend a hand with the housework.

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Dismal days—yet Herman had now done one thing of momentous import. Breathe it not, let him be known as "L. A. V.," author of "Fragments from a Writing Desk." In April he had submitted his manuscript to the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser; and in May his first purely literary effort was published in two installments. Perhaps he could survey with instruments of word and wonder territory undreamed of by the diggers of any ditch, however great and flourishing. Perhaps he did not know this yet. "Fragments" were a success in their way—not in Peter's or Maria's way, nor even in Herman's way. Gansevoort, recovered from his illness, was in New York working in the law office of Alexander Bradford, a former school fellow, and boarding with the Bradford family. He had arranged for Herman, disappointed in his engineering plans, baffled altogether, to join the crew of a Liverpool trader. Herman went to New York the first of June, carrying with him a disturbed and hurried letter from his mother to Gansevoort: "Your letter of yesterday was receiv'd & preparations forthwith commenc'd. Herman is happy but I think at heart he is rather agitated, I can hardly believe it & cannot realize the truth of his going both my boys gone in one week. "How uncertain & changeing are all things here below—but no more of this or you will stop reading. I have put up all I had for Herman that I thought would be useful, endeavour to procure for him every thing within the range of his means that will make him comfortablewrite me where his Vessel is bound, and the probable time of his Sailing. Helen went over to Waterford yesterday with Catherine & Leonard & has not yet come back. She will feel bad to have him go without his seeing her—send Allan up at once—I was rejoiced to hear of your safe arrival without injury . . ." A few days after his arrival in New York, Herman put to sea on the packet St. Lawrence, feeling—if Redburn accurately re-creates his experience—"somewhat misanthropical and desperate." What did Maria think of this venture on the part of a "son of a gentleman," who had once lived only two doors from marble houses on Broadway? The tone of her remarks on the uncertainty and change of "all things here below" suggests that her undoubtedly mixed emotions were disciplined by a new realistic acceptance. Any occupation which could earn money was welcome. It is obvious that none of the family took indebtedness lightly. Even sixteen-year-old Allan was gloomy. He left his uncle's law office (not wanted, he felt) and followed his brothers to New York. No luck: back again to Albany. All through the year 1839 he was made the object of Gansevoort's big-brother admonitions, Augusta's sympathetic advice,

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and his mother's commanding solicitude, as the following samples from their letters show. Gansevoort wrote from N e w York, January 2, 1839: " M y dear Allan—Your business letter of the 21st ult was duly received, and did you very great credit on the whole. Its matter was so very good that I regret to be compelled by my sense of duty to point out the very faulty & careless style of its penmanship—and altho' strikingly bad in itself—it seemed even worse in my eyes, because I well know that you can write better if you try . . ." And again, this time from Lansingburgh (March 1839, Wednesday): " M y dear Allan—we received yesterday your letter of the 4th inst. The manifest improvement in your hand-writing gave Mamma & myself much pleasure." In midsummer Allan received a sympathetic letter from Augusta: " . . . I hope dearest that you feel more quieted and less nervous, you do not know how it pained me to see you in that state, I would willingly have taken those feelings myself to have restored you to your former cheerfulness. I know dear Ally you are sick and that is all sufficient for you feeling so excited, but do strive to calm your mind for my sake and all those who love you dearly, it will do no good to allow yourself to be so unhappy, you cannot at present extricate yourself, you can only tell them how you are situated, and do your best, by every means in your power, to keep up your spirits. I feel very much for you, oh I wish that I could only assist you, I would with the last farthing I had, I know you have been thoughtless and this has placed you where you are, but there is no use in these gloomy retrospections, I know experience will teach you a lasting lesson, and when once free of debt, it will be for ever . . . Guert was here yesterday, he started for Clarendon Springs this morning, he looks very much like Herman, we all noticed it, Oh how he blames Herman for going to sea . . . Augusta." From his mother Allan, now in Albany, received a letter written in Lansingburgh, September 25, 1839: " W e were all greatly disappointed at not seeing you on Saturday. I hope you are well & not detained by sickness. N o day different from its neighbor helps to mark time in this quiet regular Village, therefore when we expect you and are disappointed it is a serious affair, and on the whole rather disappointing to us who have so little to cheer or enliven our reflections. "I should have written you last week, that we had receiv'd a letter from Herman, dated Liverpool 9th July, he writes that he is well, very anxious to see home, and to prove it, says he would give all the sights of Liverpool to see a corner of home." Another letter of motherly complaint (Lansingburgh, December 7, 1839) concerned not his handwriting but his spelling: " M y dear Allan,

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by Herman who came up last evening I receiv'd your beautifully written letter, excuse me if I again require you to be more careful about the spelling of words, remember that oblige has but one b, & Helen but one /. that pantaloons are spelt without er, and that possibly requires two s'i, instead of one, that Biscuit is spelt with an /—& that surprised has but one p and that the r should be where you have the other p, that seems is spelt with the two e's together not separated by the letter m—in recommend are two nis instead of one . . ." When Herman returned from his first experience of the sea in the fall of that dismal year of 1839, he found his mother so impoverished that even the furniture was advertised for sale. Uncle Peter, though by now somewhat straitened himself, came to the rescue again; and Herman found a teaching job in Greenbush, a hamlet southeast of Albany, now known as East Greenbush. In December Maria could write Peter: " M y son Herman is now doing well and will be able to allow me from $ 100 to $200 a year. Allan will soon be able to earn more than he needs for Clothing and will be able to assist me also . . . Herman will need nearly the whole of his first quarter's salary after paying his board, to procure necessary clothing &c." In the same letter she suggested $50 a month as a regular allowance from her brother. It was a bitter begging letter. Her plight was bitter. Herman fully realized this, and had reduced his own expenses to a minimum, walking the thirteen miles from Greenbush to Lansingburgh to spend week ends with the family. But Maria, in a letter to Allan in December 1839, said that she felt "cheered by Herman's prospects." T o his mother's letter Herman added a facetious note to his younger brother, now clerking for the law firm of Ten Broeck and French in Albany at five dollars a month. His language suggests shipboard and Liverpool Streets, and perhaps was meant to poke mild fun at his mother's concern over Allan's spelling: " M y Dear Sergeant—How is you? Am you very well? How has you been?—As to myself I haint been as well as husual. I has had a very cruel cold this damation long time, & I has had and does now have a werry bad want of appetisement. —I seed Mrs. Peebles tother day and she did say to me to not fail to tell you that she am well. N o more at present from your friend T a w ney." The year ended, and the new year began in the same impoverished way. Herman found a few weeks' employment teaching at Brunswick, two miles from Lansingburgh. But now not only Maria and her family were suffering: by June such were the financial straits of the community that Herman's school was closed till winter for lack of funds, and he was paid off, with six dollars in his pocket. It was the worst depression that America had yet experienced.

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Herman now sought out his Uncle Thomas Melville in Galena, Illinois; but in that year of great depression he found that Galena had offered his uncle's family even a poorer living than Pittsfield. Is it strange that the mighty Mocha Dick, the legendary monster of the whale fishery, encountered in the Pacific in July and again in August, should have exerted a hidden influence on the sensitive, baffled youth? Here, in the malignant leviathan breaching from the depths, was an adversary that offered an understandable challenge to youthful courage. That autumn too Herman had read with "strange, congenial feelings" his "sea-brother" Dana's Two Years before the Mast. Another son of a gentleman had done it! Herman went to New York. ("That's the place where all the convicts are sent, is it very large?"—so wrote an Englishwoman to her friend, Evert Duyckinck, about this time!) Gansevoort, also in N e w York, wrote on November 26, 1840, one of his typical older-brother letters to young Allan, who had found new employment in Albany: ". . . Herman is still here. He has been & is a source of great anxiety to me. He has not obtained a situation. He has so far been entirely unsuccessful. You need not mention this to Hill—as his little mind would gloat over [Eli] Fly's disappointment. They are both in good health & tolerable spirits—and living at a cheap rate of $2.50 per week, exclusive of dinner—They dine with me every day but Sunday & are blessed with good appetites—as my exchequer can vouch. Herman has had his hair sheared & whiskers shaved & looks more like a Christian than usual. Be prudent—economical & get out of debt for your own sake & that of your friend & brother Gansevoort Melville." On December 26, 1840, Herman arrived in N e w Bedford; and on January 3, 1841, he set sail on the whaler Acushnefs maiden voyage to the South Seas. Farewell mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, old friends. And lost love? There may have been more than one reason why Herman took to sea again. Mocha Dick seems to have had entrance to the heart of a disappointed lover. In a letter to William H. Gilman, August 21, 1947, Mrs. Frances G . Wickes wrote, "Melville was in love with my Grandmother [Mary Eleanor Parmelee]. The reports about their reading Tennyson together, his letters to her etc. are quite true. She was in love with my grandfather, Pelitiah Bliss. Their marriage was delayed by his illness, but he was Melville's rival in her affections." Mrs. Wickes also said that the love affair took place before Melville left Lansingburgh for the South Seas; that Mary Parmelee burned the letters which Melville had written to her; and that the volume of Tennyson was lost. There may have been disappointments in love after this, notably what seems to have been an attraction to his friend Eli Fly's sister Harriet. But for a well

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authenticated case it is unnecessary to look further than Mary Eleanor Parmelee. While Herman took his fate into his own hands, Gansevoort wrote to his father's old friend, Lemuel Shaw, from N e w York, Monday, January u , 1841: ". . . I did not communicate to any of my relatives in Boston, my intention of taking a voyage for the restoration of my health, nor the fact that it is owing exclusively to your kindness and liberality that I will be enabled to carry an otherwise futile plan into effect. I am not certain that I was right, but the reason which influenced me was this. None of them made anything more than the most general possible enquiries regarding the situation of my Mother, myself or any of the family. This course (accidental as it probably was) left me no alternative but that of a voluntary confidence which not being sought after by them did not appear to be required of me. "If my conduct on this point, or on any other, should not meet your approbation, I trust that the interest you have manifested in me will not prevent you from concealing the fact. From my Father's death it has been my misfortune that I have had no adviser of mature age, experience & knowledge of the world in whose purity of motive and soundness of judgment, I could place confidence. Am I too sanguine in hoping that that void, in matters of importance, will now be supplied by my Father's early friend—who on more intimate acquaintance will, I trust, be disposed to feel himself justified in transferring that confidence and affection to his Son. T o merit this adds another to the many incentives to virtuous and vigorous action which I now possess . . ." The "homage of superior respect" which his Uncle Peter Gansevoort once "accepted" from the boy appears not to have grown undeviatingly with the years. Gansevoort was right in recognizing the purity of motive and soundness of judgment that the whole subsequent history of Lemuel Shaw's relations with the Melville family abundantly proved. The close-knit existence at home went on in Herman's absence. Gansevoort continued to try to fill the role of father. He could do no more about Herman. Allan's "very faulty & careless style of penmanship" had already improved, and he must have taken to heart his older brother's advice in a letter of the previous year: "It is a good idea to preserve the letters of those who are near & dear to us—They serve in after days as mementoes of the past—kindling in our minds vivid recollections of former emotions & forgotten scenes, & serving to prove the falsehood of some & the faith of others—I would have you my dear brother form this habit—You will never regret its acquirement . . . " Tom, the youngest of the family, was now eleven; so he began to

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receive from Gansevoort a series of would-be paternal letters; for example, one dated N e w York, September 19, 1842: " M y dear Tom— N o w that the advanced state of the season requires less of your attention in the garden, the time which during the summer has been so occupied should be employed upon your studies. It is very difficult my dear brother for little boys to convince themselves or be convinced by the argument of others, of the inestimable importance of a good education—Like all things valuable it requires labor—but Oh how amply, with what rich returns does it compensate that labor! . . . "Picture to yourself, Tom, how painful it must be to be constantly aware of deficiencies in one's early education—to be oppressed in society & amid the world with a humbling sense of mental inferiority— to be forced into silence when you would speak—to listen without understanding—to distrust your own mind—to be uncertain about your own judgement—unable to sustain your own opinion—& then, too perhaps be prevented by circumstances and the want of time from repairing the deficiencies of which too late, you have become aware—If anything can add to the poignancy of feelings like these, it would be the consciousness that these thousand wants and mortifications are all owing to love of ease and pleasure and lack of ordinary industry . . . "I entreat you my dear brother to read this letter more than once— to ponder on it—to refer to it whenever your will is wavering and your endeavor weak—and then act as I would have you act . . ." Allan, now coming to man's estate, was neglected by neither his brother nor his mother, as a few letters of moral suasion from the latter will show. Maria wrote from Lansingburgh, May 1, 1841: ". . . Remember my beloved Son that you are now arriving at an age when the reason with which Your Maker endowed you, is to be cultivated, to be called into action . . . you have to choose between, respectability, the sure reward, of virtuous conduct, the approbation of your own conscience, & the contrary results arising from an unrestrained indulgence of your unhallowed impulses 8c wicked passions. Be wise in time & remember you are fatherless, excuse a mother's anxiety & adopt her advice as you would save yourself from unhappiness . . . [P.S.] Do not go out in the Evening with young men, but stay at home & study, go to bed early, be pure in mind, think purely, and remember that from 'the heart proceeds all evil, & learn to keep your heart with all diligence.'" Another letter to Allan from his mother, August 7, 1842, showed her concern for Gansevoort too: ". . . Be with your Brother Gansevoort as much as possible he is weak, very thin, and at present has no appetite, he is imprudent in exerting himself when he is unable to bear it . . . by all means my dear Allan cherish and cultivate an ardent

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warm attachment to him . . . you must by this time have discovered the cold heartlessness of the world, and its knowledge should make you cling more & stronger to your own flesh and blood . . ." With how much amenability all this so-well-intentioned good counsel was followed cannot be proved; nor do we know how good it seemed to the recipients. It is certain that those who gave it had unquestioned faith in its wisdom. Whether Herman received such letters we do not know: one assumes that he did. If so, he must have had the wisdom to destroy them. It is said of him much later in life that his sisters "were all a little afraid of him"; possibly there was always something in his temperament that made him resent assumed superiority of others in the moral field. Gansevoort was doing well financially and was beginning to make successful campaign speeches for the Democratic presidential candidate Polk. "Do me the justice to believe," he wrote Judge Shaw in July 1843, "these ephemeral successes, these triumphs of the hour, are neither overestimated by me, nor tend to lure my time and thoughts from efforts towards those attainments, and that sterling efficacy of character which form the only true basis of deserved and lasting success." Nevertheless at twenty-eight he was beginning to feel the fascination of a social success that Herman, when not much older, was to regard as a temptation to "a pondering man"—as indeed it was. But Gansevoort had no white whale thrashing in his depths. N o such creature disturbed his equanimity at a gathering of which he wrote Allan from Albany in January 1843: "Yesterday I dined and took tea with Mr. De Peyster Douw at his beautiful home on Clinton Square— We had a very pleasant time. Helen & Augusta were of the party. I very much admire Mrs. Douw. There are few more agreeable, stylish or high-bred women—I have been out a good deal, and am very well received wherever I go." Snobbery? A rather engaging candor too. Gansevoort felt he was his own severest critic of his oratory, that gift beloved of mid-Victorian America. If he could hold an audience two hours and forty minutes—an audience "large in numbers & most respectable in point of intelligence," he must have felt he was "right as well as politic." He could exclaim on occasion, "Hang policy—My blood is up!" What happened to Herman between December 26, 1840, when he boarded the Acushnet, and October 14, 1844, when he landed in Boston honorably discharged from service on the frigate United States, had no connection with the members of his family, beyond the very real one (to him) of his own memories and continuing emotions. Communication was impossible most of the time. A package of letters directed to

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him at Honolulu was never received. One letter of his to Gansevoort from Peru, in the summer of 1841, assured his brother that he was "in perfect health, & not dissatisfied with his lot." He had found his friend, Richard Tobias Greene, " T o b y " of Typee, a congenial spirit, which may account for Gansevoort's saying that Herman's "being one of a crew so much superior in morale & early advantages to the ordinary run of whaling crews affords him constant gratification." This account, given Lemuel Shaw by Gansevoort in July of the following summer, is rather a rosy interpretation of fact, whether originating with Gansevoort or quoted from Herman. If Herman wrote other letters while he was at sea, they have not been preserved. T o his family this period of his life was a long questionable blank. Outside of his books, he recorded one important impression. In his memoir of Owen Chase, first mate of the whale-rammed Essex and the narrator of its disastef, Melville wrote, "The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me." These words hint at one of the deep roots of the future Moby Dick!

CHAPTER TWO

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Herman set foot on a Boston wharf. Upsprang into the full-bodied reality of the present mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, old friends: and hovering in the unrealized future were wife, sons, daughters, granddaughters, in-laws, and unknown congenial spirits. His own spirits were high and at the service of his family. A gamesome letter, gamesome rather as a Saint Bernard puppy might be with a kitten, went to his sister, Catherine. She was "born with what the Yankees call lan anxious make]" and could "wear herself to an anatomy" on occasion. New York, Jany 20th 1845 M y Dear Sister: What a charming name is yours—the most engaging I think in our whole family circle.—I dont know how it is precisely, but I have always been very partial to this particular appelative & can not avoid investing the person who bears it, with certain quite captivating attributes; so, when I hear of Kate Such a one—whether it be Kate Smith or Kate Jones, or Kate Any Body Else I invariably impute to the said Kate all manner of delightful characteristics.—Not, that terms of general admiration will do at all, when applied to the Clan—Kate—for the Kates, D'you see, are a peculiar race, & are distinguished by peculiar attributes—Thus, the Kates as a general rule are decidedly handsome, but if we may not speak of their beauty in terms of unqualified admiration, they still will be found to incline towards good looks, and at any rate, they are never positively ugly.—But, "Fine feathers dont make fine birds" & "Handsome is, that handsome does" & all that sort of thing;— & so if the Kates were only distinguishable by their beautiful plumage, why, I would not give a fig for a Kate, any more than I would for a Gloriana Arabella Matilda—not I,—for mere beauty is among the least of the manifold merits of the Kates. Besides loveliness of form & face, the Kates are always amiable, with fine feelings, a little too modest at times, but wondrous sly, always in good humor, sometimes in regular mad-cap spirits, & once in a while (I am sorry to say it) rather given to romping & playing Miss Billy—But then I love them all the better for that, for they romp with such grace & vivacity, that I verily believe

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they are more dangerous then, than at other times; tho' to say truth, Kate demure, in a neat little apron & sitting in the corner marking a pockethandkerchief—for all her hypocritical pretentions—is as murderous a little elf as the biggest of the Tom-Boys—Now, I saw a girl in Broadway yesterday, & I'll lay you a rosebud her name was K a t e Why, I'm sure of it.—Didn't she have two sweet merry eyes & a round merry face, and a merry smile, & even a kind of a merry little walk— and then it was just as plain as day that she was amiable, kind-hearted, full of sensibility & all that—& it was just as plain that her name was Kate.—But I suppose you laugh & cry Pooh! at my theory of the Kates, & say it is all nonsense, a mere whim, a notion—Well, suppose it is—it is not the less true, & if you deny that, I will adduce an argument in proof, that will fairly make you blush, it is so forcible & to the point,— For, will I not bring your own sweet self in evidence? to prove my doctrine. And, say, Do you not possess all the qualities I have ascribed to this particular class,—& then pray Miss, what is your name but Kate? —Oh, Now! In Heavens's name—Dont look so abashed! What! Face, neck & bosom all bathed in glowing floods of vermillion!—Verily, Modesty is the chiefest attribute of the Kates—Come, Come, up with those drooping eye-lids & that down cast head, and confess that the Kates are better than the Pollies, & you the best of the Kates— I was overjoyed to hear My Dear Kate (Now, is it not a pretty name) that your visit to Albany has been productive of the most beneficial results to your health—I predicted as much—& knew that when I laid my commands upon your cousin-friend Miss Kate Van Vechten to restore the rose to your cheek, that she would accomplish the behest. —I congratulate you on your recovery, & hope that you will not permit inattention to diet & exercise to bring on a relapse.—I got a long & delightful letter from Augusta the other day—the morning previous to receiving it, I had sent one to her, & could not avoid thinking, when I read her communication, what a poor thing she received in exchange for it.—This morning Gansevoort got a letter from Helen—They are all well.—Gansevoort is well, & so is the Sergeant, they send much love. —Oh, I want you to find out—but never mind—Now I want you to write me a long letter, dont take a pattern after mine & fill it with nonsense, but send me a sober sheet like a good girl—You know you can put this letter of mine among your things—can't you?—My respects to all the Van Vechtens. Your loving brother Herman.

Ease and gaiety went with Herman's renewal of family relations, with his courtship of Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of his father's old friend Lemuel. There were his visits to Boston, hers to Lansingburgh. The Heart was in the ascendant.

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What of the Shaws, who had already taken an important place in the Melville family group and who were to be thrust into an even more important relation to one of its least known members? What follows will reveal something of the personalities of Herman's future wife and mother-in-law, and something more intimate of the character of Judge Shaw. With a background of Calvinist Congregationalism, a later inclination toward the greater intellectual freedom of Unitarianism, a Harvard education, a natural pleasure in social intercourse, a wide reading and appreciation of the arts, and twenty-six years of increasingly remunerative practice at the bar, Lemuel Shaw in 1830 came to the weighty decision to accept the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Even so he expressed a distrust in his own ability to rise to the requirements of the office; but that he did rise to them is amply documented by the sound logic of his decisions, recognized throughout the country during his lifetime and still quoted wherever precedent is applicable to changed conditions. Some years after his admission to the bar, Lemuel Shaw had married Elizabeth Knapp, who died in 1822, leaving a son, John Oakes, and a daughter, Elizabeth. In 1821 he married again. On February 14 of that year he wrote his future wife, Hope Savage, an encouraging word about her stepdaughter-to-be: M y daughter is between 4 & 5 and is a most amiable, intelligent & engaging child. She goes to school constantly, & has already made considerable proficiency: She can read very well, ordinary pieces both in prose & poetry. Perhaps you may think I am influenced by my partiality. It may be partly so, but I think I cannot be mistaken as to the leading and predominant traits of [my children's] characters. He was right about Elizabeth. And Hope Savage met all his warmest expectations of a mother to his little girl, who had lost hers at birth, and who had been brought up so far by her Grandmother Shaw. A relative who kept a small school in Bridgewater reported that threeyear-old Elizabeth, on a visit there, "expressed a strong inclination to participate in the benefits of my instruction; but her literary ambition left her after an hour." Hope Savage Shaw kept a diary. The quotations with which she started each year are significant of her character; her entries are short and factual. Quotation on flyleaf, 1841: W e take a note of time, But at its loss,

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T o give it then a tongue Is wise in man;— Nov. Paris with from

4. A splendid Ball [at Faneuil Hall] was given to the Prince from [Prince de Joinville, third son of Louis Phillipe]. Elizabeth went Capt. Percival . . . Dec. 22. Miss Helen Melville arrived here New York, a large ball on Thursday 23.

Quotation on flyleaf, 1842: Let time be measured not by days or hours. But by the liberal use of all our powers. The rapid flight of time let none lament, When generous acts mark every moment spent. Jan. io. Miss Melville & Elizabeth attended a sewing circle at Mrs. Abbot Lawrence. 12 Miss Melville & E. drank tea at the Maretts . . . March 12. Saturday afternoon Mr. Shaw Helen & Elizabeth & myself went to Cambridge & called upon President Quincy's family . . . March 30. Elizabeth & Mr. Joseph Cushing left for Lansingburgh. Lemuel Shaw, on one of his journeys in performance of judicial duties, wrote to his wife from Plymouth, May 15, 1842: . . . And now what shall I say to your expressions of affectionate remembrance; Pray for you? I do pray for you with the same humble and earnest sincerity,, that I pray for myself. I do now & at all times pray God to have you in his most holy keeping . . . to bless you with his grace & favour in this life, and then of sure hope of another & better state of existence. And may God of his infinite goodness, confer his blessing on my dear children, more especially the spiritual gifts & graces, which may purify and elevate their souls, make them useful and virtuous here, & pure & blessed hereafter. My prayers may be unfrequent, irregular, God forbid that they should be heartless or insincere. What enjoyment can I have in this life, what hope or expectation of happiness, if not from the affection of a wife and children, who are dear to me. Their prosperity, virtue & happiness are the only cause of my own, & I look to no other for enjoyment in this life. I want now & at all times to manifest the strength, & earnestness & tenderness of my affection for you rather by acts than by professions, by the whole tenor of my conduct and life, than any expressive declarations. I hope both may at all times concur in offering you of the ardent, sincere & constant affection with which I am most truly yours—L Shaw. His son, Lemuel, Jr., at boarding school in Northborough, the following letter, dated Boston, August 5, 1842:

received

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My dear Son. I received your letter on the subject of your studies. I will state to you what my views are, in regard to the utility of the study of the latin & greek languages I have a great opinion of the use and importance of close and systematic study, in contradistinction to loose and miscellaneous reading—It habituates the mind to close reasoning, and exact analysis. T o one whose mind is already trained to systematic study, general reading is of great advantage and interest. But I speak of a young person, whose mind is yet to be trained and formed. Now there is a period in our lives, say from 10 to 16 or 17 years old, during which it is highly important that the mind be trained to habits of close thinking and reasoning and, it is not sufficiently mature, to pursue the higher studies of philosophy and science. How shall this period be best occupied? Language is not only the medium, by which all our thoughts, feelings emotions, and ideas are obtained from and communicated to others, but language is the instrument by which the mind itself acts. This is so true, that we think in words, we cannot reason or reflect, except by the use of words. They are the very material on which the mind works, and the implements with which it works. But language, notwithstanding all the labour and learning, which have been bestowed upon it, to enrich and improve it, to give it force precision and exactness, is still extremely imperfect . . . But imperfect as language is, as a medium of thought and communication, it is the best & the only one we have. It is therefore important that we cultivate and improve our knowledge of it, to the greatest possible extent, to understand the difficult parts of speech, their curious operations and uses, as they are adapted to all the various and possible shades of thought. The intelligent study of grammar, and its application to language, is in effect an analysis of all the operations of human thought and but illustrates the operations of mind, and therefore [is] but calculated to habituate the mind to the exactness and precision, necessary in the study of philosophy and science. But for this purpose, the latin & greek language, are much better adapted than the english, because they are so much more full & copious more varied and systematic, but above all because their rules are fixed & settled, whilst those of our living languages, are fluctuating and undergoing constant changes. You see therefore the object of studying latin & greek, is not so much to acquire the power of reading latin & greek books, as it is to fit and prepare the young mind, for the study of the sciences & the higher branches of philosophy as soon as it is mature enough . . . If you come to reside in Boston, you must not suffer your mind to be diverted by points of amusement, by the thousand attractions, which

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a great city is always holding out to attract the attention of the young, you must not suffer your mind to dwell on theatrical exhibitions, string concerts, & public amusements. You will have philosophy enough, I hope, to suffer these things, to be glittering and rattling all about you, without disturbing your tranquility or distracting your mind from its determined purpose. Here is a view of language thought out as I am sure Lemuel Shaw's future son-in-law never "thought''' it out. Melville's wrestling with language was in an arena foreign to the legal mind. How different their gifts! Melville, aside from the Bible on which he had been nurtured, was to produce the Eden of Typee with no more literary influence than "loose and miscellaneous reading." Past the gates of Eden, past the wandering, a fabulous White Whale, it may be out of aboriginal Indian myth, was so to stir the depths of his being that language came to life with passion, in rhythms allied to the great language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Now a new being flowered, first recognized in the warm glow of Typee, written in 184.5. publication brought Melville the excitements of sudden fame and the stimulation of literary companionship. Melville to Lemuel Shaw, March 19, 1846: My Dear Sir: Herewith you have one of the first bound copies of Typee I have been able to procure—the dedication is very simple, for the world would hardly have sympathised to the full extent of those feelings with which I regard my father's friend and the constant friend of all his family. I hope that the perusal of this little narrative of mine will afford you some entertainment, even if it should not possess much other merit. Your knowing the author so well, will impart some interest to it.—I intended to have sent at the same time with this copies of Typee for each of my aunts, but have been disappointed in not receiving as many as I expected—I mention, however, in the accompanying letter to my Aunt Priscilla that they shall soon be forthcoming. Remember me most warmly to Mrs. Shaw & Miss Elizabeth, and to all your family, & tell them I shall not soon forget that agreeable visit to Boston. With sincere respect, Judge Shaw, I remain gratefully & truly yours, Herman Melville. Passage omitted from the published version of J. E. A. Biographical Sketch of Herman Melville (1891):

Smith's

[Herman's Aunt Priscilla Melville] was very fond of her handsome nephew . . . and was proud of the fame which he had suddenly won

34

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MELVILLE

by the publication of his stories of South Sea adventures; but she did not quite approve of all of them, and had a mischievous idea that it would be a good thing to relieve the exuberant praise he was receiving wherever the English language was read, by a little good natured teasing . . . Herman's enjoyment of his newly acquired renown ivas sobered by the dark shadow of Gansevoort's death after his brief service as secretary of legation at the Court of St. James's, London. In what follows the fame of one brother and the death of the other are intermingled. Qansevoort Melville's Diaries, London, 1846: January 7 Wednesday: 10 a m—Washington Irving & Mr Jno Murray the publisher breakfasted with me. Mr I seemed very happy to meet the son of his old friend. They talked of old times, of old Mr M , Scott, Rogers, Wildie, Gifford, Lockhart &c &c I listened. At 12 Mr M went away & I read to Mr Irving various parts of the first 10 chapters of Herman's forthcoming book. He was very much pleased—declared portions to be "exquisite," sd the style was very "graphic" & prophesied its success—This delighted me. Gansevoort to Herman, from London, April 3, 1846: My dear Herman: Herewith you have copy of the arrangement with Wiley & Putnam for the publication in the U. S. of your work on the Marquesas. The letter of W & P under date of Jan 13th is the result of a previous understanding between Mr Putnam & myself. As the correspondence speaks for itself, it is quite unnecessary to add any comment. By the steamer of tomorrow I send to yr address several newspapers containing critiques on your book. The one in the "Sun" was written by a gentleman who is friendly to myself, and may possibly from that reason have made it unusually eulogistic—Yours of Feb 28 was reed a few days ago by the sailing packet Joshua Bates. I am happy to learn by it that the previous intelligence transmitted by me was "gratifying enough." I am glad that you continue busy, and in my next or the one after that will venture to make some suggestions about your next book. In a former letter you informed me that Allan had sent $100. home the first of his collections (I refer to the money sent at your request). It appears that the $100—was part of the ¿ 9 0 & 10— making $100. which I sent out by the Van L steamer. Allan seems to find it entirely too much trouble to send me the monthly accounts of receipts & disbursements. I have reed no accounts from him later than up to Nov 30th and consequently am in a state of almost entire ignorance as to what is transpiring at No 10 Wall St. This is very unthinking in him for my thoughts are so much at home that much of my

TRITON TRIUMPHANT

35

rime is spent in disquieting apprehensions as to matters & things there. I continue to live within my income, but to do so, am forced to live a life of daily self denial. I do find my health improved by the sedentary life I have to lead here. The climate is too damp & moist for me. I sometimes fear that I am gradually breaking up. If it be so—let it be— God's will be done. I have already seen about as much of London society as I care to see. It is becoming a toil to me to make the exertion necessary to dress to go out, and I am now leading a life nearly as quiet as your own at Lansingburgh—I think I am growing phlegmatic & cold. Man stirs me not nor woman either. My circulation is languid. My brain is dull. I neither seek to win pleasure or avoid pain. A degree of insensibility has been stealing over me, & now seems permanently established, which, to my understanding is more akin to death than life. Selfishly speaking I never valued life much—it were impossible to value it less than I do now. The only personal desire that I now have is to be out of debt. That desire waxes stronger within me, as others fade. In consideration of the little egotism which my previous letters to you & the family have contained, I hope that Mother, brothers & sisters will pardon this babbling about myself. As to Fanny—when I receive the accounts I will write fully. Tom's matter has not been forgotten. You say there is a subject &c &c "in which I intended to write but will defer it"—What do you allude to? I am careful to procure all the critical notices of 'Typee' which appear & transmit them to you. The steamer which left Boston on the ist will bring me tidings from the U S as to the success of Typee there. I am, with love & kisses to all, Affectionately Your brother, Gansevoort Melville. Accompanying Gansevoort's letter to Herman was the following quotation from Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene i: Death.Ay, but to die, and go we know not where: To lie in cold obstruction and to rot: This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod: and the delighted spirit [To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside] In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice: To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless & uncertain thoughts Imagine howling!—'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

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Can lay on nature, is a paradise T o what we fear of death. When Herman, on May 29, 1846, wrote a cheerful, reassuring reply to Gansevooris melancholy letter, he -was unaware that his older brother had died more than two weeks before. My dear Gansevoort—I look forward to three weeks from now, & think I see you opening this letter in one of those pleasant hamlets round about London, of which we read in novels. At any rate I pray Heaven that such may be the case & that you are mending rapidly. Remember that composure of mind is everything. You should give no thought to matters here, until you are well enough to think about them. As far as I know they are in good train. Mr. Boyd's second letter announcing your still continued illness was a sad disappointment to us. Yet he seemed to think, that after all you were in a fair way for recovery—& that a removal to the country (then it appears intended shortly) would be attended with the happiest effects. I can not but think it must be;—& I look for good tidings by the next arrival.—Many anxious enquiries have been made after you by numerous friends here.— The family here are quite well—tho' very busy dressmaking. Augusta is one of the bridesmaids to Miss C Van. R. and her preparations are now forwarding. People here are all in a state of delirium about the Mexican War. A military ardor pervades all ranks—Militia Colonels wax red in their coat facings—and 'prentice boys are running off to the wars by scoresNothing is talked of but the "Halls of Montezumas." And to hear folks prate about those purely figurative apartments one would suppose that they were another Versailles where our democratic rabble meant to "make a night of it" ere long.—The redoubtable General Veile "went off" in a violent war paroxysm to Washington the other day. His object is to get a commission for raising volunteers about here & taking the field at their head next fall.—But seriously something great is impending. The Mexican War (tho' our troops have behaved right well) is nothing of itself—but "a little spark kindleth a great fire," as the well known author of the Proverbs very justly remarks—and who knows what else this may lead to—Will it breed a rupture with England? Or any other great power?—Prithee, are there any notable battles in store —any Yankee Waterloos?—or think once of a mighty Yankee fleet coming to the war shock in the middle of the Atlantic with an English one.—Lord, the day is at hand, when we will be able to talk of our killed & wounded like some of the old Eastern conquerors reckoning them up by thousands;—when the Battle of Monmouth will be thought child's

TRITON

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37

play—and canes made out of the Constitution timbers be thought no more of than bamboos.—I am at the end of my sheet—God bless you M y Dear Gansevoort & bring you to your feet again. Herman Melville. Typee is coming on bravely—a second edition is nearly out.—I need not ask you to send me every notice of every kind that you see or hear of. After the family had been notified of Gansevoort1 s death, Herman wrote to his Uncle Peter from Lansingburgh, June 13, 1846: M y dear Uncle—Yesterday I received a letter from the Secretary of State—stating that Mr. McLane was authorized to charge £ 5 0 ($250) to the contingent expenses of the Legation for the funeral expenses of Gansevoort.—This will cover every thing, & leave enough to bestow some testimonial of an esteem upon Mrs. Mansfield, & to remunerate the colored man who tended Gansevoort during his illness.—So that all that matter, I rejoice to think is happily settled.—I have written to Mr. McLane & Mr. Boyd instructing the latter as to the disposal of the amount which will remain after paying the bills mentioned in his letter to us.—I have also strongly acknowledged our gratitude to both for their many attentions to the deceased . . . I think it more than probable that the Prince Albert will not arrive before the latter part of next week.—I shall defer my departure for New York until Wednesday P . M . — O f course I shall see you before I go —Believe me Dear Uncle Affectionately Herman. Some time during the eventful year of 1846 Herman received a present of a Testament & Psalms from his Aunt Jean Melville. What he copied in the back of it reflects the depths of his thought and the warm flow of his spirits: "Who well considers the Christian religion, would think that God meant to keep it in the dark from our understandings, and make it turn upon the motions of our hearts." St. Evremont. "If we can conceive it possible, that the creator of the world himself assumed the form of his creature, and lived in that manner for a time upon earth, this creature must seem to us of infinite perfection, because susceptible of such a combination with his maker. Hence in our idea of man there can be no inconsistency with our idea of God: and if we often feel a certain disagreement with Him & remoteness from Him, it is but the more on that account our duty, not like advocates of the wicked Spirit, to keep our eyes continually on the nakedness and wickedness of our nature; but rather to seek out every property &

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beauty, by which our pretension to a similarity with the Divinity may be made good." Yet another concern of Herman's he gave expression to by what he quoted, and underscored in part, in the front cover of the Testament. "In Life he appears as a true Philosopher—as a wise man in the highest sense. He stands firm to his point; he goes on his way inflexibly; and while he exalts the lower to himself, while he makes the ignorant, the poor, the sick, partakers of his wisdom, of his riches, of his strength, he, on the other hand, in no wise conceals his divine origin; he dares to equal himself with God; nay to declare that he himself is God. "In this manner is he wont from youth upwards to astound his familiar friends; of these he gains a part to his own cause; irritates the rest against him; and shows to all men, who are aiming at a certain elevation in doctrine and life, what they have to look for from the world. "And thus for the nobler portion of mankind, his work and conversation are even more instructive and profitable than his death; for to those trials every one is called, to this trial but a few." Of encouragement, hopefulness, and news domestic and national in a brotherly letter to Gansevoort; of necessary practical arrangements in communication with Uncle Peter; of the soul's concern in his Testament & Psalms: these records bear witness to a many-sided man. Still another aspect of Melville's personality is revealed in a playful, practical letter to his new friend and literary adviser, Evert A. Duyckinck, of the publishing firm of Wiley and Putnam. Duyckinck was a bookish man, alive to the values of contemporary literature, as he proved when in 1847 he became editor of Osgood's Literary World, and joint editor, owner, and publisher with his brother George a year later. The Literary World was the finest American literary weekly of its time, and the first to stress discussion of current books. This it did intelligently until it was discontinued in 1853. Duyckinck, with his lively editor's mind and his hospitality to artists of stage, book, and gallery, naturally welcomed the young author of Typee among his friends. Melville found in his new acquaintance a sensitive, generous, well-read companion who all his life had possessed the ease and opportunity for aesthetic and intellectual enjoyment that Melville had largely missed. The younger man was soon given the freedom of Duyckinck's fine large library and became one of the weekly guests, known as the Knights of the Round Table, who met in the Duyckinck basement at 20 Clinton Place for discussion of literature and the arts over cigars and punch. Melville to Evert Duyckinck, from Lansingburgh, July

1846:

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TRIUMPHANT

39

There was a spice of civil scepticism in your manner, my dear Sir, when we were conversing together the other day about "Typee"— What will the politely incredulous Mr Duyckinck now say to the true Toby's having turned up in Buffalo, and written a letter to the Commercial Advertiser of that place, vouching for the truth of all that part (what has been considered the most extraordinary part) of the narrative, where he is made to figure.— Give ear then, oh ye of little faith—especially thou man of the Evangelist—and hear what Toby has to say for himself.— Seriously, my dear Sir, this resurrection of Toby from the dead— this strange bringing together of two such places as Typee & Buffalo is really very curious.—It can not but settle the question of the book's genuineness. The article in the C. A. with the letter of T o b y can not possibly be gainsaid in any conceivable way—therefore I think it ought to be pushed into circulation. I doubt not but that many papers will copy it—Mr. Duyckinck might say a word or two on the subject which would tell.—The paper I allude to is of the ist Inst. I have written Toby a letter & expect to see him soon & hear the sequel of the book I have written (How strangely that sounds!) Bye the bye, since people have always manifested so much concern for "poor Toby," what do you think of writing an account of what befell him in escaping from the island—should the adventure prove to be of sufficient interest?—I should value your opinion very highly on this subject.— I began with the intention of tracing a short note—I have come near writing a long letter. Believe me, my Dear Sir—Very Truly Yours—Herman Melville. [P.S.] Pardon me, if I have unintentionally translated your patronymick into the Sanscrit or some other tongue—"What's in a name?" says Juliet—a strange combination of vowels & consonants, at least in Mr Duyckinck's, Miss, is my reply. H. M. P.S. N o 2. Possibly the letter of Toby might by some silly ones be regarded as a hoax—to set you right on that point, altho' I only saw the letter last night for the first—I will tell you that it alludes to things that no human being could ever have heard of except Toby. Besides the Editor seems to have seen him. It seems to be understood (from what has happened heretofore) that I should leave a little legacy of a note for Mr Duyckinck every time I leave town—In conformity with which understanding, I now bequeath you these few lines, on the eve of my departure for another, & I trust, a cooler land. You remember you said something about anticipating the piracy that might be perpetrated on the 'Sequel,' by publishing an extract or two from it—which you said you would attend to—I meant to speak to

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you again about it—but forgot so to do. However, be so good, as to consider yourself now reminded of it b y these presents. I take this to be a matter of some little moment. T h e Revised (Expurgated?—Odious w o r d ! ) Edition of T y p e e ought to be duly announced—& as the matter (in one respect) is a little delicate, I am happy that the literary tact of Mr. Duyckinck will be exerted on the occasion.— Do forgive this boring you forever, and Believe me M y Dear Mr Duyckinck V e r y Faithfully yours Herman Melville J u l y 28th '46. Five months later Melville sought again the literary tact of his friend on the subject matter of his second book, Omoo. Evert Duyckinck, a good Episcopalian, evidently saw no harm in the critical passages about some South Sea missionary activities which were to draw attacks from certain well-intentioned but uninformed missionary sources. Melville wrote from New York, December 8, 1846: M y Dear Mr. Duyckinck: I arrived in town last evening from the East. A s I hinted to you some time ago I have a new book in M.S. —Relying much upon your literary judgement I am very desirous of getting your opinion of it & (if you feel disposed to favor me so far) to receive your hints.—I address you not as being in any w a y connected with Mssrs W & P but presume to do so confidentially & as a friend. In passing thr' town some ten days since I left M.S. with a particular lady acquaintance of mine; at whose house I intend calling this evening to obtain it. T h e lady resides up town. On my w a y down I will stop at your residence with the M.S. & will be very much pleased to see you—if not otherwise engaged.—I will call, say at 81/2 . . . [P.S.] If you are to be engaged this evening pray inform me b y the bearer. Evert Duyckinck wrote his brother George, December 15, 184.6: Melville is in town with new Mss agitating the conscience of John W i l e y and tempting the pockets of the Harpers. I have read it. His further adventures in the South Seas after leaving Typee. He owes a sailor's grudge to the missionaries & pays it off at Tahiti. His account of the church building there is very much in the spirit of Dickens humorous hawking of sacred things in Italy. Melville, meanwhile, was earnestly in search of a means of earning a living, but without result: literature must answer. He had written to Peter Gansevoort from New York, February 3, 1847: M y dear Uncle: I hear that by the passage of the N e w Loan Bill a number of additional offices are to be at once created in the Treasury

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41

Department at Washington.—I have determined upon going there, with a view of making an application for one—or, if I do not succeed in this specific object, to press such claims as I have upon some other point. I have obtained several strong letters from various prominent persons here to the most influential men at the seat of government. And my purpose in writing you is to obtain from you another letter to Gen. Dix, which would be of great service to me.—As I leave here tomorrow, if you immediately write & enclose the letter to my address at Washington it will reach me there very shortly after my arrival.— My best remembrances to my Aunt & cousins, and Believe Me, Very Sincerely, Yours Herman Melville. Helen Melville wrote from Lansingburgh, June u, 1847, to Augustus Van Schaick—"Cousin Gus"—in Rio de Janeiro: Our village remains very much as you left it, few startling events occur to break the monotony & our days pass in quiet dearth of excitement very healthful no doubt, and conducive to longevity . . . Herman has returned from a visit to Boston, and has made arrangements to take upon himself the dignified character of a married man some time during the Summer, about the first of August. Only think! I can scarcely realize the astounding truth! . . . Herman's "Omoo" has been wonderfully successful. In one week after it was issued the whole edition of 3000-3 500 was disposed of and another was put in progress. It has been [more] highly spoken of on both sides of the Atlantic than its predecessor even, as containing more instructive matter. He bears himself very meekly under his honours however, and to prove it to you, I mention casually, that he is now at work in the garden, very busy hoeing his favorite tomatoes. The corn was attended to yesterday. Sea currents ran through the summer of 1847. An opportunity to meet Richard Henry Dana, Jr., came to Melville a month before his marriage. Dana's cousin, Ida Russell, wrote July 8, 1847: Dear Richard, Mr. Herman Melville is expected to take tea with us tomorrow which is Friday afternoon. He would like to meet you. I hope you will be able to come. If you see Mr. Hudson will you be so kind as to extend the invitation to him . . . When the wedding invitations had been sent out, Dr. Amos Nourse (second husband of Herman's aunt, Lucy Melville Clark) wrote to Lemuel Shaw, from Bath, Maine, July 23, 1847: Lucy has always felt a peculiar attachment to her nephew, & Elizabeth has so established her claims upon the affectionate regards of both of

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us, that the prospective marriage of a sister or a child would hardly interest more. Nothing therefore could give us more heartfelt pleasure than to become witnesses of the interesting ceremony you advert to, the prelude, we fondly hope & trust, of abounding happiness. Evert Duyckinck

noted in his diary July 31,

1847:

Dined with Herman Melville at the Astor House. He is to be married next Wednesday. He is cheerful company, without being . . .* There is no record that Evert Duyckinck had met Elizabeth Shaw at this time. If he recognized genius in his friend, as he seems to have done, he must have wondered about the kind of woman chosen by him for a wife. One cannot help feeling that Maria Melville had used a steering oar, that the ocean currents were supplemented by her activity. Melville's own expression of feeling is contained in a passage he marked in his copy of Coriolanus. ". . . Know thou first, I loved the maid I married; never man Sigh'd truer breath . . ." That the rest of the passage celebrates the ardent admiration and love of Aufidius for Coriolanus strengthens, rather than weakens, the lines quoted. Melville marked the whole speech. On August 4, 1847, in the New South Church, Boston, Herman and Elizabeth became man and wife. Hope Shaw in her characteristic laconic vein, noted in her diary: "Elizabeth was married to Herman Melville the day was very pleasant." The wedding of Herman's brother Allan and Sophia Thurston soon followed. Uncle Thomas Melville's daughter, Anne Marie Priscilla, wrote from Pittsfield to Augusta Melville, September 26, 1847: W e received Allan's wedding cards in due season—In imagination, I saw them at the altar—attended by those nearest & dearest to both— and afterwards—as a happy bride & groom—the centre of a joyous circle—tell me 'Gus—(for I believe you were present)—Did they not look like Divinities?—& of course they left New York for a short time —for space & freedom, to enjoy the dawn of their wedded bliss—Was their love so ethereal, (like Herman's & Lizzie's) that it bore them upward, towards a heavenly paradise—or did they seek one among the lovely beauties of earth? . . . * This is followed b y a heavily inked-out passage, of which only a f e w tantalizing words can be deciphered or guessed at from an infrared photograph: "original," "his writings," "a great deal as Washington Irving."

TRITON

Evert Ducykinck tember 23:

TRIUMPHANT

reported to his brother George in London,

43

Sep-

Last evening passed an hour or two very pleasantly at wedding of Allan Melville (a brother of Typee) who has married a Miss Thurston in Bond St. Herman was there with his Boston Bride and the two brothers in a few days commence housekeeping together in this neighborhood. It promises to be an agreeable house to visit at. Miss Melville—a sister—was kind and impressive, with more softness than the East Hampton ladies. Herman Melville is preparing a third book which exhausts the South Sea marvels . . . This was Mardi, the book that started so factually—then swept him into an allegorical venture which puzzled all his enthusiastic readers, but marked him for the first time as more than a writer of sea stories. Evert Duyckinck's

diary, October 6, 1847:

The Art Union opened its new rooms to night in its Broadway quarters . . . a long hall, well lighted, the walls covered with paintings by Cole, Page, Brown, Gignoux, Hicks &c, the floor well sprinkled with good fellows, the artists generally of fine personal appearance, a selection from the Press . . . Herman Melville dropping in, I carried him along, introducing him to Mr. Bryant and others. One of Sully's bathing nymphs suggested Fayaway . . . In November, Evert Duyckinck wrote a long newsy letter to his brother George, a part of which follows: I am getting less fastidious about many things, realizing that we have only a life interest and not a fee simple in the things of this world, finding more good in common enjoyments, thinking a good digestion infinitely better than an elegantly bound library. I have never enjoyed extraordinary fine weather more than this season. You must not think because American publishers are not the choicest fellows in the world and since newspapers are quicksands and trade a rat trap that there is no living in America. There are cakes and ale even if Griswolds, Wileys, Appleton &c &c are not virtuous. . . . Melville has got into a happier valley than the Happar not far from here and wife and I have looked in at the Ti—two very pretty parlors odorous of taste and domestic felicity. He is a right pleasant man to pass an evening with and I think I may promise you some pleasure from his society.

C H A P T E R THREE

HERMAN'S

LIZZIE

The personality of Elizabeth Shaw Melville is first suggested in three letters 'written to her mother on her honeymoon; the first of these carries a postscript from Herman to his father-in-law. Her personality is more fully revealed in her letters from the joint domestic establishment of the Melvilles in New York during the next year. Center Harbor, Aug. 6th, 1847 M y Dear Mother: You know I promised to write you whenever we came to a stopping place, and remained long enough. We are now at Center Harbor, a most lonely and romantic spot at the extremity of Winnepisscogee lake, having arrived last evening from Concord—and we intend to remain until to-morrow. One object in stopping so long and indeed principal one was to visit "Red Hill"—a mountain (commanding a most beautiful view of the lake) about four miles distant. But today it is so cloudy and dull, I am afraid we shall not be able to accomplish it—so you see I have a little spare time, and improve it by writing to relieve any anxiety you may feel. Though this is but; the third day since our departure, it seems as if a long time had elapsed, we have seen so many places of novelty and interest. The stage ride yesterday from Franklin here, though rather fatiguing, was one of great attraction from the beautiful scenery. To-morrow we again intend to take the stage to Conway, and from thence to the White Mountains. I will write again from there, and tell you more of what I have seen, but now I send this missive more to let you know of our safety and well-being than anything else. I hope by this time you have quite recovered from your indisposition, and that I shall soon hear from you to be assured of it—I hardly dare to trust myself to speak of what I felt in leaving home, but under the influence of much commingling thoughts, it entirely escaped me to tell you of any place to which you might address a letter to me so that I should be sure to get it. Now I am very anxious and impatient to hear from you, and I hope you will lose no time in writing if it be only a very few lines. Herman desires to add a post-

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45

script to my letter, and he will tell you when and where to write so that I may get it. Remember me with affection to father and ask him to let me have a letter from him soon,—to all members of the family and to Mrs. Melville and the girls—my mother and sisters—how strangely it sounds. Accept a great deal of love for yourself, my dear mother, and believe me as ever, your affectionate daughter, Elizabeth—even though I add to it—Melville—for the first time. Friday morning. My Dear Sir: At my desire Lizzie has left a small space for a word or two.—We arrived here last evening after a pleasant ride from Franklin, the present terminus of the Northern Rail Road. The scenery was in many places very fine, & we caught some glimpses of the mountain region to which we are going. Center Harbor where we now are is a very attractive place for a tourist, having the lake for boating and trouting, and plenty of rides in the vicinity, besides Red-Hill, the view from which is said to be equal to anything of the kind in New England. A rainy day, however, has thus far prevented us from taking our excursion, to enjoy the country.—To-morrow, I think we shall leave for Conway and thence to Mt. Washington & so to Canada. I trust in the course of some two weeks to bring Lizzie to Lansingburgh, quite refreshed and invigourated from her rambles.—Remember me to Mrs. Shaw & the family, and tell my mother that I will write to her in a day or two. Sincerely yours, Herman Melville. Letters directed within four or five days from now, will probably reach us at Montreal. Quebec, Aug. 21st 1847 My dear Mother, From my date you perceive we have reached Quebec. We arrived yesterday morning after passing two days very pleasantly in Montreal . . . Both cities, Montreal and Quebec impress a stranger very curiously, everything seems so different from New England. I like Montreal much the best though—Quebec looks cold and forbidding and comfortless with its heavy walls and gates, and its huge citadel bristling with cannon. Yesterday we visited the fortifications and strolled about on the ramparts—and then only, looking down upon what is called the "Lower Town" far below your feet can you realize its immense height. Officers and men "in her Majesty's service" are met at every turn, and every few steps you encounter a sentry in full Highland costume bare knees and all, pacing backward and forward fully armed and equipped, keeping strict guard over nothing at all. However the military punctilio must be observed, and they all look as savage and soldierlike, as if indeed they had a band of rebels under

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guard . . . The House at which we are staying, the best one in the place, is a great rambling, scrambling old castle of a thing, all stairs and entries and full of tawdry decorations. A forbidding strangeness pervades the place and makes me want to get out of it as soon as possible . . . There are no travellers scarcely, and but one or two ladies in the house. The table is mostly filled with English officers who are not always as refined and elegant as they might be . . . I find much inconvenience from "want of drink." I do not dare to drink the water and brandy or anything in it only spoils it for me—so I have to get along as best I may without. However I can drink the milk very well, occasionally a little soda water—We have both been perfectly well, and suffered no inconveniences except occasionally when I have got very tired. The stage riding was rather fatiguing though very pleasant. We were much disappointed that we did not find letters for us in Montreal. Did you receive the two I wrote you? One from Conway, and one from Haverhill. Remember me with love to all, not forgetting Mrs. S[ullivan] and neighbor Haines [?]. Affectionately yours Elizabeth S. M. Lansingburgh, Aug. 28th, 1847 M y Dear Mother: W e arrived here safe and well yesterday morning, and I intended to have written a few lines to you then, but I was so tired, and had so much to do to unpack and put away my things, I deferred it until to-day. W e left Montreal on Tuesday evening and the next day in the afternoon had [reached] Whitehall, at the foot of Lake Champlain, after a very pleasant sail on that beautiful piece of water. The next question was whether we should proceed to Lansingburgh by stage or take the canal boat. W e thought stage riding would be rather tame after the beautiful scenery of Vermont, and as I had never been in a canal boat in my life, Herman thought we had better try it for the novelty. This would expedite our journeying, too, and having once set our faces homeward, we were not disposed to delay. Being fully forewarned of the inconvenience we might expect in passing a night on board a canal boat—a crowded canal boat, too, and fully determining to meet them bravely, we stepped on board—not without some misgivings, however, as we saw the crowds of men, women and children come pouring in, with trunks and handboxes to match. Where so many people were to stow themselves at night was a mystery to be yet unravelled, and what they all did do with themselves is something I have not yet found out. Well, night drew on—and after sitting on deck on trunks or anything we could find (and having to bob our

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heads down every f e w minutes when the helmsman sang out "Bridge!" or " L o w Bridge!") it became so damp and chilly that I was fairly driven below. Here was a scene entirely passing description. T h e Ladies' "saloon!" they politely termed it so, as w e were informed by a red and gilt sign over it, a space about as large as my room at home, was separated from the gentlemen's "saloon" by a curtain only. About 20 or 25 women were huddled into this, each one having two children apiece of all ages, sexes and sizes, said children, as is usual on such occasions, lifting up their respective voices, very loud indeed, in one united chorus of lamentations. A narrow r o w of shelves was hooked up high on each side and on these the more fortunate mothers had closely packed their sleeping babies while they sat b y to prevent their rolling out. I looked round in vain f o r a place to stretch m y limbs, but it was not to be thought of —but after a while b y a fortunate chance I got a leaning privilege, and fixing m y carpet-bag for a pillow, I made up my mind to pass the night in this manner. One by one the wailing children dropped off to sleep and I had actually lost myself in a sort of doze, when a new feature in the case became apparent. Stepping Carefully over the outstretched forms on the floor came two men, each bearing a pile of boards or little shelves like those already suspended. These they hooked up against the side of the smallest conceivable spaces, using every available inch of room—and were intended to sleep ( ! ) upon. I immediately pounced upon one of them which I thought might possibly be accessible, and was just consulting with myself as to the best means of getting into it, when I was politely requested b y one of the sufferers to take the shelf above from which she wished to remove her children to the one I thought to occupy—Of course I complied, and after failing in several awkward attempts, I managed to climb and crawl into this narrow aperture like a bug forcing its w a y through the boards of a fence. Sweltering and smothering I watched the weary night hours pass away, for to sleep in such an atmosphere was impossible. I rose at three o'clock, thinking it was five, spent a couple of hours curled upon the floor, and was right glad when Herman came for me, with the joyful intelligence that w e were actually approaching Whitehall—the place of our destination. He also passed a weary night, though his sufferings were of the opposite order—for while I was suffocating with the heat and bad atmosphere, he was on deck, chilled and half-frozen with the f o g and penetrating dampness, for the gentlemen's apartment was even more crowded than the ladies'—so much so that they did not attempt to hang any "shelves" f o r them to lie upon. All they could do was to sit bolt upright firmly wedged in and if one

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of them presumed to lean at all or even to nod out of the perpendicular it was thought a great infringement of rights, and he was immediately called to order—so Herman preferred to remain on deck all night to being in this crowd. W e left the boat and took the cars about an hour's ride from Lansingburgh, and surprised the family at six o'clock in the morning before they were up. W e were very warmly welcomed and cared for and soon forgot our tribulations of the canal boat. I was much disappointed to miss the boys—they had only left the day before—it was too bad—I am looking forward with such impatience to see you and father, and sincerely hope nothing will happen to prevent your coming. I suppose we shall not be here long. Allan is looking out for a house in N. Y. and will be married next month. You know a proposition was made before I came here that I should furnish my own room, which for good reasons were then set aside— but if it is not too late now, I should like very much to do it if we go to N . Y.—but we can talk about that when I see you. I must bring my scribbling to a close, after I have begged you or somebody to write me. I have not received a single line since I left home. H o w did the dinner party go off? I want to hear about everything and everybody at home. Please give my warmest love to all and believe me your afFectionate daughter, Elizabeth S. M. Herman desires his kindest remembrances to all. By late September Herman and Elizabeth were established, with Herman's mother, his brother Tom, and four sisters, in addition to Allan Melville and his bride, in the Fourth Avenue house bought jointly by Lemuel Shaw for his daughter and her husband, and by Allan for himself and his wife. Elizabeth's letters to her mother reflect the domestic scene. No stepmother could have been more of a mother than Hope Shaw was to Elizabeth. N e w York, Dec. 23rd, 1847. Thank you, dear Mother, for your nice long letter. I was begining to be afraid you had forgotten your part of the contract for that week, but Saturday brought me evidence to the contrary and made us even. And I should have written you earlier, but the days are so short, and I have much to do, that they fly by without giving me half the time I want. Perhaps you will wonder what on earth I have to occupy me. Well in fact, I hardly know exactly myself, but true! it is, little things constantly present themselves and dinner time comes before I am aware. W e breakfast at 8 o'clock, then Herman goes to walk and I fly up to put his room to rights, so that he can sit down to his desk immediately on his return. Then I bid him good-bye with many charges

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to be an industrious boy and not upset the inkstand, and then flourish the duster, make the bed, etc., in my own room. Then I go downstairs and read the papers a little while, and after that I am ready to sit down to my work—whatever it may be—darning stockings—making or mending for myself or Herman—at all events, I haven't seen a day yet, without some sewing or other to do. If I have letters to write, as is the case today, I usually do that first—but whatever I am about, I do not much more than get thoroughly engaged in it, than ding-dong goes the bell for luncheon. This is half-past IZ o'clock—by this time we must expect callers, and so must be dressed immediately after lunch. Then Herman insists upon taking a walk every day of an hour's length at least. So unless I can have rain or snow for an excuse, I usually sally out and make a pedestrian tour a mile or two down Broadway. By the time I come home it is two o'clock and after, and then I must make myself look as bewitchingly as possible to meet Herman at dinner. This being accomplished, I have only about an hour of available time left. A t four we dine, and after dinner is over, Herman and I come up to our room and enjoy a cosy chat for an hour or so—or he reads me some of the chapters he has been writing in the day. Then he goes down town for a walk, looks at the papers in the reading room etc., and returns about half-past seven or eight. Then my work or my book is laid aside, and as he does not use his eyes but very little by candle light, I either read to him, or take a hand at whist for his amusement, or he listens to our reading or conversation, as best pleases him. For we all collect in the parlour in the evening, and generally one of us reads aloud for the benefit of the whole. Then we retire very early —at 10 o'clock we all disperse—indeed we think that quite a late hour to be up. This is the general course of daily events—so you see how my time is occupied; but sometimes—dear me! we have to go and make calls! and then good-bye to everything else for that day! for upon my word, it takes the whole day, from i o'clock till four! and then perhaps we don't accomplish more than two or three, if unluckily they chance to be in—for everybody lives so far from everybody else, and all Herman's and Allan's friends are so polite, to say nothing of Mrs. M.'s acquaintances, that I am fairly sick and tired of returning calls. And no sooner do we do up a few, than they all come again, and so it has to be gone over again. You know ceremonious calls were always my abomination, and where they are all utter strangers and we have to send in our cards to show who we are, it is so much the worse. Excepting calls, I have scarcely visited at all. Herman is not fond of parties, and I don't care anything about them here. To-morrow night, for a great treat, we are going to the opera—Herman & Fanny and I—and this is the first place

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of public amusement I have attended since I have been here—but somehow or other I don't care about them now. I am glad to hear that father and all are well—except Sam—how is his cough now? don't forget to tell us when you write. If Susan Hayward and Fanny Clarke are at our house please give my love to them and ask Susan to answer my letter. How is Mrs. Marcus Morton and Mrs. Hawes? I hope you will be able to write me this week though I know your time is very much occupied—but then you know any letter—even the shortest and most hurried is acceptable and better than none—though I must confess my prejudice runs in favour of long ones—but I am glad to hear anything from home. You addressed my last letter just right and it came very straight —but Allan's name is spelt with an "a" instead of an "e"—as Allan—not Allen—different names, you see—I am hoping that sometime or other father will find time to write to me—though I know he is so much occupied with other matters. Thank you for your kindness about the picture box—as I do not need any article at present, I will keep the dollar till I do—it will be the same thing, you know, and I have already got such a New Year's present in the big box upstairs—by the way, in about a week more, it will be time to open it. Oh, what do you think about my calling on Mrs. Joe Henshaw and Josephine—they are living here and came here after I did, so perhaps I ought to call first if it is best for me to visit them—being connected with the Haywards perhaps it would be better to renew the acquaintance. What do you think about it? Please tell me when you write, and get their address from Aunt Hayward, if you think I had better call. I am afraid you are tired of this long letter; but I have done now. Goodbye, and love to all. Affectionately yours, Elizabeth S. Melville. I had a letter from Mrs. Cogswell a few days since—I didn't know she had lost one of her twins before. Why didn't you tell me? My love to Mrs. Sullivan. I hope she is quite well again. Tell Lem we expect him here next month in his vacation to make us a visit. New York, Feb. 4th, 1848. My Dear Mother: Every day for the last week I have been trying to write to you, but have been prevented. I received your letter by Lemuel with much pleasure and the next time you write I want you to tell me more about Carrie—how she and the small baby are getting along—and whether she took ether when she was sick and if so, with what effect. What have they decided to name the baby and all about it—Your presents were very acceptable—Herman was much gratified with your remembrance of him—and intends to make his acknowledgments for himself. You forgot Kate in the multitude of Melvilles

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—so I just gave her my share of the bill you enclosed without saying anything about it—knowing you would not intentionally leave her out— or rather I gave the bill to Helen for herself, Fanny and Kate, as she could get what they wanted better than I—so it's all right now, and I will take the will for the deed and thank you all the same. The key of the basket that you wanted me to send—you know— I have no bills there whatever—you have them all. I only have an account of the expenditure and a memorandum of the bills that were paid—not the items of the bills. If you have an opportunity when it will come safe I should like to have you send me that basket very much. You speak of a Mr. Crocker whom you wish me to receive. If he will call I shall be very happy to see him. I don't know how else I can see him. You know we are recently renumbered and our address now is "No. 103 Fourth Avenue," "between nth & 12th Streets"— it is safer to add for a time. Lem seems to be enjoying himself highly with the amusements out of doors, and the society within. Last night he went to a masked ball, under the auspices of Mrs. Elwell, through Aunt Marett's kindness, and a very fine appearance he presented, I can assure you, in an old French court dress—with a long curled horse-hair wig, chapeau bras —knee breeches, long stockings, buckles, snuff box and all—it was a very becoming dress to him, and exactly suited to his carriage and manners—I wish you could have seen him. We went to a party ourselves last evening, but we had a deal of fun helping him to dresshe went masked of course, but being introduced by Mrs. Elwell was very kindly received—taking Mrs. Dickinson (the hostess) down to supper, and doing the polite thing to the nine (!) Misses Dickinson. He enjoyed it much, as you may suppose, and did not get home till four o'clock in the morning, and even then the ball had not broken up. At this present moment—n o'clock— I believe he is dozing on the parlor sofa—to gain strength to go to the opera this evening. We have been very dissipated this week for us, for usually we are very quiet. Wednesday evening we passed at Mrs. Thurston's and were out quite late—last night at a party—a very pleasant one too, by the way— I passed off for Miss Melville and as such, was quite a belle!! And to-night in honour of our guest, we go to the Opera. We have resolved to stop after this though and not go out at all for while Herman is writing the effect of keeping late hours is very injurious to him—if he does not get a full night's rest or indulges in a late supper, he does not feel bright for writing the next day. And the days are too precious to be thrown away—and to tell the truth I don't think he cares very much about parties either, and when he does it is more on my account than his own. And it's no sacrifice to me, for I am quite as

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contented, and more—to stay at home as long as he will stay with me —He has had communications from London publishers with very liberal offers for the book in hand—and one from Berlin to translate from the first sheets into German—but as yet he has closed with none of them, and will not in a hurry. I believe I forgot in my last to acknowledge the receipt of a paper from father—I was very glad of it—please present my thanks—I have intended to write to father for a good while—but I like to have answers to my letters—so if father has not time to write in reply, you must write for him. Give my love to him and to all the family—and when you see Susan Morton ask her to write to me. Tell Aunt Lucretia I was delighted to get her note, and I will write to her. N o w I have written you a famous long letter and I hope you will write me as long a one very soon, for I have not heard from home for more than a week now—not since Lem came. Give my love to Mrs. Sullivan, and believe me as ever truly yours, E. S. Melville. Lemuel Shaw, Jr., reported to his mother from New York, January 30, 1848: I went to the top of Trinity church steeple, with Herman & Allan . . . went with Helen & Lizzie to Brooklyn, w e called on a Mrs. Gansevoort . . . went to see Aunt Marett—saw Mr. Marett—not Ellen. W e n t with Herman to see the Aquaduct bridge over the Haarlem river. T o church with Mrs. A . Melville (Church of Ascension) & with Augusta (Calvary Church). That little Mr. [Edmund] Dana from Boston called here. Though Herman had taken time to entertain his brother-in-law Lemuel, even while he "worked very hard at his books—sat in a room without fire, wrapped up," yet he did not eschew social gatherings altogether. Miss Anne Lynch, who had a literary salon, gave a Valentine party, for which Bayard,Taylor wrote Melville's valentine. VALENTINE

Written by James Bayard Taylor for Herman Melville February 14, 1848 Bright painter of those tropic isles, That stud the blue waves, far apart, Be thine', through life, the summer's smiles, And fadeless foliage of the heart: And may some guardian genius still Taboo thy path from every ill.

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Elizabeth's interests and sympathies were called upon in a diversity of directions in the large New York household—a condition very different from her circumscribed position as only daughter of Judge Shaw. "The book," house-cleaning, visitors coming and going, the fortunes of the absent were all claims upon her. Tom, the youngest Melville son, had followed the sea-going propensities of his older brother (and of more than one of his cousins), and had made his first voyage at sixteen—to his mother's distress, it must be imagined, since she knew too well what conditions and companions he might find. Lizzie entered sympathetically into her feelings and shared Herman's concern for Tom's care, as the following letters to Hope Shaw show. N e w York, May 5th, 1848. M y Dear Mother: I am very much occupied to-day but I snatch moments to reply to your letter which though rather tardy in forthcoming was very acceptable. But you did not tell me what I most wanted to know—about Sam. And your indefinite allusion to it, when we were all waiting to hear, was rather tantalising. Does "this season" mean now in his present vacation, or sometime in the course of the year? I suppose his vacation has already commenced if he is out at Milton, then why not let him come immediately and make his visit, because if he waits till warm weather it will not be nearly as pleasant or as beneficial for him. Maria Percival writes me that she is coming on soon and he might come with her. Please write me something definite about it, as soon as you can, and do let him come. We want him to very much, and the sooner the better. You ask about our coming to Boston but I guess the house will be ready to clean again by that time—for it will not be before July, perhaps August. Herman of course will stick to his work till "the book" is published and his services are required till the last moment —correcting proofs etc. The book is done now, in fact (you need not mention it) and the copy for the press is in progress, but where it is published on both sides of the water a great deal of delay is unavoidable and though Herman will have some spare time after sending the proof sheets to London which will be next month sometime probably he will not want to leave N e w York till the book is actually on the booksellers' shelves. And then I don't care about leaving home till my cold is over, because I could not enjoy my visit so much. So though I am very impatient for the time to come I must e'en wait as best I may and enjoy the anticipation . . . W e are looking out for Tom to return every day, his ship has been reported in the papers several times lately as homeward bound and

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Herman wrote to the owner at Westport and received answer that he looked for the ship the first of May. That has already past and we are daily expecting a letter to announce her actual arrival. Then Herman will have to go over to Westport for Tom and see that he is regularly discharged and paid, and bring him home. As yet he, Tom, is in entire ignorance of the changes that have taken place in his family and of their removal to New York. So he will be much surprised I think. As you may suppose, Mother is watching and counting the days with great anxiety for he is the baby of the family and his mother's pet. Augusta is going to Albany in a few days to visit the Van Renssalaers. They have been at her all winter to go up the river but she would not, and now Mr. Van Renssalaer is in town and will not go back without her. And in a few weeks Helen is going to Lansingburgh to visit Mrs. Ives. I should write you a longer letter but I am very busy to-day copying and cannot spare the time so you must excuse it and all mistakes. I tore my sheet in two by mistake thinking it was my copying (for we only write on one side of the page) and if there is no punctuation marks you must make them yourself for when I copy I do not punctuate at all but leave it for a final revision for Herman. I have got so used to write without I cannot always think of it. Please write me very soon this week—if only a few lines and tell me about Sam's coming. M y love to all, to father when you write and to Sue Morton if she is at our house, Mrs. Hawes etc. and believe me as ever your affectionate E. S. Melville. Miss Savage and Miss Lincoln called to see me a day or two ago. Please spell Allan's name with an A, not E. Allan, not Allen. N e w York June 6th 1848 M y dear Mother, I suppose by this time that you have received Sam's letter and are relieved of anxiety concerning his safe arrival. I was very glad to see him at last and hope he will enjoy his vacation—You need not fear his getting too much excited—he will not take too much exercise for he can always get in an omnibus when he feels tired of walking. Yesterday he went down town with Tom—to the battery and to a gallery of paintings—and in the afternoon took a short walk with the girls. We should have gone to Brooklyn, but it was very cloudy and looked like rain—but we are going today as soon as I get done my copying—(by the way we are nearly through—shall finish this week). Sam is very well and finds much amusement in the cries especially the "ar-i-sh-e-e-e-s!" (radishes) screamed continuously under our window in every variety of cracked voices. I was very much pleased with my presents . . . "tapes" are always

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useful especially if one has a husband who is continually breaking strings off of drawers as mine is—the cuffs were very pretty also— Herman was much pleased with his pocket book—and says "he has long needed such an article, for his bank bills accumulate to such an extent he can find no place to put them." He sends much love and thanks. By the way there is not such a vast difference in "articles of taste" as you suppose between here and Boston . . . Mother feels very uneasy because Tom wants to go to sea again— he has been trying for a place in some store ever since he came home but not succeeding, is discouraged, and says he must go to sea immediately. Herman has written to Mr. Parker (Daniel P.) to see if he can send him out in one of his ships. I hope he will, if Tom must go, for Mr. Parker would be likely to take an interest in him and promote him . . . And now for something which I hardly know whether to write you or not I feel so undecided about it. My cold is very bad indeed —perhaps worse than it has ever been so early, and I attribute it entirely to the warm dry atmosphere so different from the salt air I have been accustomed to—and Herman thinks I had better go back to Boston with Sam to see if the change of air will not benefit me. And he will come on for me in two or three weeks if he can—and then in August when he takes his vacation he will take me there again. But I don't know as I can make up my mind to go and leave him here—and besides I'm afraid to trust him to finish up the book without me! . . . But I must go to my writing . . . I hope you don't show my letters to anyone—you know I write in great haste and only for your eye. Certain characteristics of the young Elizabeth appear in these letters. She1was certainly happier being cosily domestic than sharing the fatigues and mild adventures of stage-coach and canal-boat travel and the "forbidding strangeness" of Montreal and Quebec. New York is at least not "so different from New England." Poor Lizzie—all her life she waited till she went to Boston to buy certain minutiae at The Thread and Needle Shop, because one "could not get them in New York." Augusta, whose sensitive response to the essential in human beings was so natural, used the phrase that best characterized her sisterin-law—simply "Kind Lizzie." She has been described to me by her half-brother Samuel as "easily discouraged"; she certainly was domestic in her tastes without proficiency; her life with a genius husband brought her much that she was emotionally unequal to; yet her, loyalty and devotion to him were unswerving, even when she complained bitterly of her hardships to a confidant, her niece Josephine Shaw. But the strength of her character was a monumental strength—simply kindness.

C H A P T E R FOUR

LOOMINGS Melville sat in his cold work-room wrapped in coat and shawl, writing "Mardi," the book which "exhausts the South Sea marvels as Evert Duyckinck had written his brother. In spite of his daily labors (or perhaps because of them), and in spite, too, of prolonged family whist games, Melville found time to read the books of his choice. Evert Duyckinck, in two letters written in March 1848, tells his brother George of Melville's occupations: Melville the other night brought me a few chapters of his new book which in the poetry and wildness of the thing will be ahead of Typee & Omoo. I played the longest rubber of whist last night at his house I ever encountered. It was like his calm at sea—in the new book. What a punishment for a gambler in the next world—an interminable game of whist.— By the way Melville reads old Books. He has borrowed Sir Thomas Browne of me and says finely of the speculations of the Religio Medici that Browne is a kind of "crack'd Archangel." Was ever any thing of this sort said before by a sailor? Evert Duyckinck did not yet know the true temper of his friend; but Melville's declining to review a certain book for him must have made him more aware. Melville wrote him on November 14, 1848: What the deuce does it mean?—Here's a book positively turned wrong side out, the title page on the cover, an index to the whole in more ways than one.—I open at the beginning, & find myself in the middle of the Blue Laws & Dr O'Callaghan. Then proceeding, find several extracts from the Log Book of Noah's Ark—Still further, take a hand at three or four bull fights, & then I'm set down to a digest of all the commentators on Shakespeare, who, according "to our author" was a dunce & a blackguard—Vide passim. Finally the book—so far as this copy goes—winds up with a dissertation on Duff Gordon Sherry & St Anthony's Nose, North River.—

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You have been horribly imposed upon my Dear Sir. The book is no book, but a compact bundle of wrapping paper. And as for Mr Hart, pen & ink, should instantly be taken away from that infatuate man, upon the same principle that pistols are withdrawn from the wight bent on suicide.—Prayer should be offered up for him among the congregations, and Thanksgiving Day postponed until long after his "book" is published. What great national sin have we committed to deserve this infliction? —Seriously, Mr Duyckinck, on my bended knees, & with tears in my eyes, deliver me from writing ought upon this crucifying Romance of Yachting. —What has Mr Hart done that I should publicly devour him? —I bear that hapless man no malice. Then why smite him? —And as for glossing over his book with a few commonplaces,— That I can not do.—The book deserves to be burnt in a fire of asafetida, & by the hand that wrote it. Seriously again, & on my conscience, the book is an abortion, the mere trunk of a book, minus head arm or leg.— Take it back, I beseech, & get some one to cart it back to the author. Yours sincerely H. M. In Boston, where his son Malcolm was born on February 16, 1849, Melville had two months of leisure to make "close acquaintance with the divine William," and to write his impressions of other matters to his friend Evert Duyckinck. He found time as well for some masculine society, as a letter of Richard Henry Dana's to his brother Edmund, March 18, 1849, shows. Here is the first mention, incidentally, of Melville's dramatic ability: Melville has made a visit here and I have passed two nights with him at Parker's, once to meet James Dana, and the other to meet Cabot, who has just come from sea, a son of Mr. Fr. Cabot. He is incomparable in dramatic story telling. He has a son recently born. Melville to Evert

Duyckinck:

[Boston] Feb 24th [1849] Dear Duyckinck: Thank you for satisfying my curiosity. Mr. Butler's a genius, but between you & me, I have a presentment that he never will surprise me more.—I have been passing my time very pleasantly here. But chiefly in lounging on a sofa (a la the poet Gray) & reading Shakespeare. It is an edition in glorious great type, every letter whereof is a soldier, & the top of every "t" like a musket barrel. Dolt & ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he's

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full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment Shakespeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakespeare's person.—I am mad to think how minute a cause has prevented me hitherto from reading Shakespeare. But until now, any copy that was come-atable to me, happened to be in a vile small print unendurable to my eyes which are tender as young sparrows. But chancing to fall in with this glorious edition, I now exult over it, page after page.— I have heard Emerson since I have been here. Say what they will He's a great man. Mrs Butler * too I have heard at her Readings. She makes a glorious Lady Macbeth, but her Desdemona seems like a boarding school miss.—She's so unfeminely masculine that had she not, on unimpeachable authority, borne children, I should be curious to learn the result of a surgical examination of her person in private. The Lord help Butler—not the poet—I marvel not he seeks being amputated off from his maternal half. My respects to Mrs. Duyckinck & your brother. Yours H Melville. Mount Vernon Street, Saturday, [March] 3d. Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a Brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man. Swear he is a humbug—then is he no common humbug. Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have mystified—I will answer that had not old Zack's father begot him, Old Zack would never have been the hero of Palo Alto. The truth is that we are all sons, grandsons, or nephews or great-nephews of those who go before us. No one is his own sire.—I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his once in Putnam's store—that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture.—To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. — N o w , there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctively perceptible. This I see in Mr. Emerson. And frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool;—Then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.—I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he dont attain * F a n n y Kemble, whose husband, Pierce Butler, sued f o r divorce in 1848 and w o n his case in 1849.

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the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now—but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began. I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was, the insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked right across the brow. And never will the pullers-down be able to cope with the builders-up. And this pulling down is easy enough—a keg of powder blew up Block's Monument— but the man who applied the match, could not, alone, build such a pile to save his soul from the shark-maw of the Devil. But enough of this Plato who talks thro' his nose. T o one of your habits of thought, I confess that in my last, I seemed, but only seemed irreverent. And do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubilations over Shakespeare, that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand afar off & alone, & burn some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk.—I would to God Shakespeare" had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine Duyckinck punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare from articulation. N o w I hold it a verity, that even Shakespeare, was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.—There, I have driven my horse so hard that I have made my inn before sundown. I was going to say something more—It was this.—You complain that Emerson tho' a denizen of the land of gingerbread, is above munching a plain cake in company of jolly fellows, & swigging off his ale like you & me. Ah, my dear sir, that's his misfortune, not his fault. His belly, sir, is in his chest, & his brains descend down into his neck, & offer an obstacle to a draught of ale or a mouthful of cake. But here I am. Good b y e — H . M. March 28th Boston Dear Duyckinck—When last in N e w York, you expressed a desire to be supplied in advance with the sheets of that new work of mine [Redburn]. Yesterday in a note to Cliff Street I requested them to furnish you with the sheets, as ere this they must have been printed. They are for your private eye. I suppose the book will be published now in two or three weeks. Mr. Bentley is the man in London.—Rain, Rain, Rain—an interminable rain that to seek elsewhere than in Boston

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would be utterly vain—Rhyme by Jove, and spontaneous as heartbeating.—This is the Fourth Day of the Great Boston Rain, & how much longer it is to last the ghost of the last man drowned by the Deluge only knows. I have a continual dripping sensation; and feel like an ill-wrung towel—my soul is damp, & by spreading itself out upon paper seeks to get dry. Your well saturated H Melville. Boston April 5th 1849 Dear Duyckinck—Thank you for your note, & the paper which came duly to hand. By the way, that "Smoking Spiritualized" is not bad. Doubtless it has improved by age. The quaint old lines lie in coils like a sailor's pigtail in its keg. — A h this sovereign virtue of age—how can we living men attain unto it. We may spice up our dishes with all the condiments of the Spice Islands & Moluccas, & our dishes may be all venison & wild boar—yet how the deuce can we make them a century or two old? — M y Dear Sir, the two great things yet to be discovered are these —The Art of rejuvenating old age in men, & oldageifying youth in books.—Who in the name of the trunk makers would think of reading Old Burton were his book published for the first to day?—All ambitious authors should have ghosts capable of revisiting the world to snuff up the steam of adulation, which begins to rise straightway as the Sexton throws his last shovelfull on him.—Down goes his body & up flies his name. Poor Hoffman *—I remember the shock I had when I first saw the mention of his madness.—But he was just the man to go mad—imaginative, voluptuously inclined, poor, unemployed, in the race of life distanced by his inferiors, unmarried—without a port or haven in the universe to make. His present misfortune—rather blessing—is but the sequel to a long experience of unwhole habits of thought.—This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him,—which but few men do. For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains. What sort of sensation permanent madness is may be very well imagined—just as we imagine how we felt when we were infants, tho' we can not recall it. In both conditions we are irresponsible & riot like gods without fear of fate.—It is the climax of a mad night of revelry when the blood has been transmuted into brandy.—But if we prate much of this thing we shall be illustrating our own proposition.— I am glad you like that affair of mine [Mardi]. But it seems so long * Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806-1884), author and editor, w h o in 1849 was committed to a mental hospital.

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now since I wrote it, & my mood has so changed, that I dread to look into it, & have purposely abstained from so doing since I thanked God it was off my hands.—Would that a man could do something & then say—It is finished.—not that one thing only, but all others—that he has reached his uttermost, & can never exceed it. But live & push —tho' we put one leg forward ten miles—it's no reason the other must lag behind—no, that must again distance the other—& so we go till we get the cramp & d i e . — I bought a set of Bayle's Dictionary the other day, & on my return to N e w York intend to lay the great old folios side by side & go to sleep on them thro' the summer, with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brown in the other—Good bye I'm called.—I shall be in N e w York next week—early part. H Melville. Lemuel Shaw wrote "Peter Gansevoort on April n that the Melvilles had departed the day before for New York and added: They have a beautiful boy . . . apparently perfect and healthy in all his senses & faculties, & as far as countenance can indicate, bright & intelligent. I hope he will be a source of comfort to them & to all his connections. The "fogs" of Mardi (to use his wife's puzzled expression) drifted through the spring and summer of the year 1849. Mardi, Melville's first venture into the metaphysical field, was followed by another down-toearth, bread-and-butter winner, Redburn. He must have loved his first metaphysical departure as much as he claims to have scorned the "plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience" he produced next; for those "fogs" were shot through with rainbow colors, intimations to him of riper fires as yet unrealized. But Elizabeth was puzzled by her husband's strange new book—and was much occupied with her young son. On April 30, once again settled in New York, she wrote her mother: I consider myself quite well again now, go out every day (with Malcolm) and feel tolerably strong—I think a great deal of my long visit at home, and all the kindness and attention received while there—particularly from you—and to such good treatment in a great measure I feel that I am indebted for my present well-being. Nothing can sufficiently repay kindness and affection and I can only give you my heartfelt thanks, with assurances that it will never be forgotten—Malcolm is very well, and improving daily in size and intelligence . . . I suppose by this time you are deep in the "fogs" of "Mardi"—if the mist ever does clear away, I should like to know what it reveals to you—there seems to be much diversity of opinion about "Mardi" as might be supposed. Has father read it? When you hear any individual

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express an opinion with regard to it, I wish you would tell me—whatever it is—good or bad—without fear of offence—merely by way of curiosity. Malcolm is calling me very loud, so I must close my epistle . . . Melville was apparently neither surprised nor discouraged by the adverse criticisms of Mardi; he refers to them without bitterness in a letter to Lemuel Shaw, from New York, April 23, 1849: M y dear Sir—Mrs. Sullivan returns to Boston conveying the intelligence of Lizzie's improving strength, & Malcolm's precocious growth. Both are well. We all expect Samuel to honor us with his presence during the approaching vacation; and I have no doubt he will not find it difficult to spend his time pleasantly with so many companions. I see that Mardi has been cut into by the London Athenaeum, and also burnt by the common hangman in the Boston Post. However the London Examiner & Literary Gazette; & other papers this side of the water have done differently. These attacks are matters of course, and are essential to the building of any permanent reputation—if such should ever prove to be mine.—"There's nothing in it!" cried the dunce, when he threw down the 47th problem of the 1st Book of Euclid—Thus with the posed critics—But Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve "Mardi." I trust that you will be able so to arrange your affairs as to afford us a more lengthened visit this summer than you did last year. All the family beg to be kindly remembered—Sincerely Yours H Melville. Melville to Richard Bentley, the British publisher, from New June 5, 1849:

York,

Dear Sir—The critics on your side of the water seemed to have fired quite a broadside into "Mardi"; but it was not altogether unexpected. In fact the book is of a nature to attract compliments of that sort from some quarters; and as you may be aware yourself, it is judged only as a work meant to entertain. And I cannot but think that its having been brought out in England in the ordinary novel form must have led to the disappointment of many readers, who would have been better pleased with it, perhaps, had they taken it up in the first place for what it really is—Besides, the peculiar thoughts & fancies of a Yankee upon politics & other matters could hardly be presumed to delight that class of gentlemen who conduct your leading journals; while the metaphysical ingredients (for want of a better term) of the book, must of course repel some of those who read simply for amusement.—However, it will reach

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those for whom it is intended; and I have already received assurances that "Mardi," in its larger purposes, has not been written in vain. You may think, in your own mind that a man is unwise,—indiscreet, to write a work of that kind, when he might have written one perhaps, calculated merely to please the general reader, & not provoke attack, however masqued in an affectation of indifference or contempt. But some of us scribblers, My Dear Sir, always have a certain something unmanageable in us, that bids us do this or that, and be done it must—hit or miss. I have now in preparation a thing of a widely different cast from "Mardi":—a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience—the son of a gentleman on his first voyage to sea as a sailorno metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale. I have shifted my ground from the South Seas to a different quarter of the globe—nearer home—and what I write I have almost wholly picked up by my own observation under comical circumstances. In size the book will be perhaps a fraction smaller than "Typee"; will be printed here by Harpers, & ready for them two or three months hence, or before. I value the English copyright at one hundred & fifty pounds, and think it would be wise to put it forth in a manner, admitting of a popular circulation . . . Very Faithfully, Dear Sir, Herman Melville.

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ACROSS T H E ATLANTIC The eventful year 1849, Melville's great year of preparation for his magnum opus, ended with a spate of practical preparations of a different kind. The following letters mirror his plans for a quick trip to London and the continent, of which he kept a record in his journal. At home he joined in playful nonsense, and signed with the rest of the household a "legal" letter of Augusta's to his father-in-law on the subject of kisses due his baby son and his niece, Maria, who were both part of the large Melville ménage at Fourth Avenue. Evert Duyckinck wrote of Melville's plans to his brother George, September 12, 1849: Melville put me all in a flutter the other evening by proposing that I should go to Europe with him on a cheap adventurous flying tour of eight months, compassing Rome! He sets out in a London-packet in a few weeks carrying the proofs of his new book "The White Jacket" with him. I told him we would talk over his plans with him as soon as you came to town 8c get the benefit of at least a dream out of the project—that if (what an if! ) I went you would be of the party (which he relished)—so you may revolve upon your European experiences with these strange impossibilities in "Millers' Porch." You can cut out a tour for him (within $1000) leaving a reasonable margin for "Omoo." Melville to Lemuel Shaw, September 10, 1849: M y dear Sir—In writing you the other day concerning the letters of introduction, I forgot to say, that could you conveniently procure me one from Mr. Emerson to Mr. Carlyle, I should be obliged to you.— W e were concerned to hear that you were not entirely well, some days ago; but I hope you will bring the intelligence of your better health along with you, when you come here on that promised visit, upon which you set out the day after tomorrow. Lizzie is most anxiously expecting you—but Malcolm seems to await the event with the utmost philosophy.—The weather here at present is exceedingly agreeable— quite cool, & in the morning, bracing.

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M y best remembrances to Mrs. Shaw & all . . . [P.S.] If, besides a letter to Mr. Carlyle, Mr. Emerson could give you other letters, I should be pleased. The Board of Health have ceased making reports.—the Cholera being almost entirely departed from the city. Melville appears not to have received a letter of introduction to Carlyle, or to anyone else, from Emerson. But Edward Everett was more interested and industrious; and Richard Henry Dana, Jr., prompted by friendship for Melville and a natural respect for Lemuel Shaw, acceded to his request for a letter to Edward Moxon, publisher of Dana's T w o Years before the Mast. Edward Everett to Judge Shaw, September [?] 184.9: M y dear Sir, Your letter of the 31 Aug. was handed to me on Saturday Evg. I am obliged as a general rule to decline giving letters of Introduction to my friends Abroad, for several reasons which will occur to you. I am however always happy to have it in my power to make exceptions, though I do it but rarely. The extraordinary merit of Mr. Melville warrants me in doing so, in this case—and a desire to meet any wish of yours furnishes me a strong additional motive. I enclose you for Mr. Melville a letter to Mr. Monckton Milnes, a young gentleman of Fortune;—an M. P.;—a Cambridge man of Trinity College;—A poet of considerable celebrity;—A very companionable person in the highest society; and another to Mr. Samuel Rogers, the Nestor of English poets now I think in his 87th Year, whose table has been for years the centre of the best society in London. M. de Beaumont is the grandson-in-law of Lafayette: he travelled in this country in 1833 with M. de Tocqueville to examine our penitentiaries;—he has written an anti-slavery novel called Marie ou I'esclavage & a work on Ireland. He was sent last year by the Provisional government of France as Minister to England, where he staid five months only. They have no society in Paris like that in London; or if they have I do not know it. But I know no one better able to introduce Mr. Melville to men of education & position, than M. de Beaumont. In sending these letters to Mr. Melville, I must ask you to request him not to mention that he has received any letters of introduction from me. I am so often applied to & so often have to refuse that it is quite desirable to me, when I do it, that it should not be known. Wishing Mr. Melville an agreeable visit to Europe & the full enjoyment of his reputation, I remain, M y dear Sir, as ever, with the highest respect, faithfully Yours—[Draft, unsigned.]

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Richard Henry Dana, Jr., to Edward Moxon, from Boston, Septem12,1849:

M y dear Sir, Allow me to introduce to you my friend, Mr. Herman Melville, of N e w York. Mr. Melville is the Author of those well known & popular narratives of adventures at sea & in the Pacific Islands, with which you are doubtless familiar. So many persons have affected to believe his a nom de guerre, that I am happy to learn his intention of visiting Europe in propria persona, so that his readers there may satisfy themselves not only that he is a veritable person, but a most agreeable gentleman of one of our best families. In some cases I might hesitate whether my relations with yourself would authorize me to introduce a friend to your attentions, but I am sure you will derive so much gratification from the acquaintance with Mr. Melville, that I feel as if I were only communicating to you a pleasure of my own. I should like very much to have him see Capt. Jones, if he is in London. Most sincerely yours Richard H. Dana, Jr. Melville hastened to send Dana thanks for the introduction to Moxon and to tell his "sea-brother" something of the manuscript he carried with him. He wrote from New York, October 6, 184.9: My dear Mr. Dana—If I have till now deferred answering your very kind letter by Judge Shaw, it has been only, that I might give additional emphasis to my reply, by leaving it to the eve of my departure. Your letter to Mr. Moxon is most welcome. From his connection with Lamb, & what I have chanced to hear of his personal character, he must be a very desirable acquaintance.—Your hint concerning a man-of-war has, in anticipation, been acted on. A printed copy of the book is before me. As it will not appear for some two or three months, may I beg of you, that you will consider this communication confidential? The reason is obvious. This man-of-war book, M y Dear Sir, is in some parts rather manof-warish in style—rather aggressive I fear.—But you, who like myself, have experienced in person the usages to which a sailor is subjected, will not wonder, perhaps, at anything in the book. Would to God, that every man who shall read it, had been before the mast in an armed ship, that he might know something himself of what he shall only read of.—I shall be away, in all probability, for some months after the publication of the book. If it is taken hold of in an unfair or ignorant way; & if you should possibly think, that from your peculiar experiences in sea-life, you would be able to say a word to the purpose—may I hope that you will do so, if you can spare the time, & are generous enough to bestow the trouble?—Your name would do a very great deal; but

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if you choose to keep that out of sight in the matter, well & good.— Be not alarmed,—I do not mean to bore you with a request to do anything in this thing—only this: If you feel so inclined, do it, & God bless you. Accept my best thanks for your kindness & believe me fraternally yours—a sea-brother—H Melville. A little nursery tale of mine (which possibly, you may have seen advertised as in press) called "Redburn" is not the book to which I refer above. Melville to Lemuel Shaw, from New York, October 6, 1849: My Dear Sir—On Monday or Tuesday next the ship is to sail, and I must bid you the last good-bye. On looking over the letters of introduction again, I am more than ever pleased with them; & would again thank you for your kindness. A few days ago, by the way, I received a letter of introduction (thro' the post) from Mr. Baldwin to his son in Paris. Lizzie is becoming more reconciled to the idea of my departure, especially as she will have Malcolm for company during my absence. And I have no doubt, that when she finds herself surrounded by her old friends in Boston, she will bear the temporary separation with more philosophy than she has anticipated. At any rate, she will be ministered to by the best of friends. It is uncertain, now, how long I may be absent; and of course, my travels will have to be bounded by my purse & by prudential considerations. Economy, however, is my motto. "Redburn" was published in London on the 25th of last month; & will come out here in the course of two weeks or so. The other book I have now in plate-proof, all ready to go into my trunk. For Redburn I anticipate no particular reception of any kind. It may be deemed a book of tolerable entertainment;—& may be accounted dull.—As for the other book, it will be sure to be attacked in some quarters. But no reputation that is gratifying to me, can possibly be achieved by either of these books. They are two jobs, which I have done for money—being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood. And while I have felt obliged to refrain from writing the kind of book I would wish to write; yet, in writing these two books, I have not repressed myself much—so far as they are concerned; but have spoken pretty much as I feel.—Being books then, written in this way, my only desire for their "success" (as it is called) springs from my pocket, & not from my heart. So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to "fail."—Pardon this egotism.

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Mama has quite recovered from her temporary indisposition; & all the family are well. They beg to be most kindly remembered to yourself, & Mrs. Shaw, & all. Add my own best remembrances to theirs, and believe me, My Dear Sir, Sincerely yours H Melville. Adverse winds delayed the sailing. Hence Melville's brief note of October 10 to Evert Duyckinck, who was to have accompanied his friend down the bay: M y Dear Duyckinck: Having taken so dramatic a farewell of my kindred this morning, and finding myself among them again this evening, I feel almost as if I had indeed accomplished the tour of Europe, & been absent a twelve month:—so that I must spend my first evening of arrival at my own fireside. Release me from my promise then, and save what you were going to tell me till tomorrow when we glide down the bay. Herman Melville. Melville briefly described his meeting with the English publisher Edward Moxon in his journal, November 20: Found him in—sitting alone in a back room—he was at first very stiff, cold, clammy, & clumsy. Managed to bring him to, though, by clever speeches. Talked of Charles Lamb—he warmed up & ended by saying he would send me a copy of his works. He said he had often put Lamb to bed—drunk. He spoke of Dana—he published D.'s book here. To Dana himself Melville gave a more detailed account of the meeting with Moxon, in a letter written May 1, 1850, after his return home. My Dear Dana—I thank you very heartily for your friendly letter; and am more pleased than I can well tell, to think that any thing I have written about the sea has at all responded to your own impressions of it. Were I inclined to undue vanity, this one fact would be far more to me than acres & square miles of the superficial shallow praise of the publishing critics. And I am specially delighted at the thought, that those strange, congenial feelings, with which after my first voyage, I for the first time read " T w o Years Before the Mast," and while so engaged was, as it were, tied & welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy—that these feelings should be reciprocated by you, in your turn, and be called out by any White Jackets or Redburns of mine—this is indeed delightful to me. In fact, My Dear Dana, did I not write these books of mine almost entirely for "lucre"— by the job, as a woodsawyer saws wood—I almost think, I should hereafter—in the case of a sea book—get my M.S.S. neatly and legibly copied by a scrivener—send you that one copy—& deem such a procedure the best publication.

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You ask me about "the jacket." I answer it was a veritable garment— which I suppose is now somewhere at the bottom of the Charles river. I was a great fool, or I should have brought such a remarkable fabric (as it really was, to behold) home with me. Will you excuse me from telling you—or rather from putting on pen-&-ink record over my name, the real name of the individuals who officered the frigate. I am very loath to do so, because I have never indulged in any ill-will or disrespect for them, personally; & shrink from any thing that approaches to a personal identification of time with characters that were only intended to furnish samples of a tribe—characters, also, which possess some not wholly complimentary traits. If you think it worth knowing, —I will tell you all, when I next have the pleasure of seeing you face to face. Let me mention to you now my adventure with the letter you furnished me to Mr. Moxon. Upon this, as upon some other similar occasions, I chose to waive ceremony; and so arranged it, that I saw Mr Moxon, immediately after his reception of the letter.—I was ushered into one of those jealous, guarded sanctums, in which these London publishers retreat from the vulgar gaze. It was a small, dim, religious looking room—a very chapel to enter. Upon the coldest day you would have taken off your hat in that room, tho' there were no fire, no occupant, & you a Quaker.—You have heard, I dare say, of that Greenland whaler discovered near the Pole, adrift & silent in a calm, with the frozen form of a man seated at a desk in the cabin before an ink-stand of icy ink. Just so sat Mr Moxon in that tranced cabin of his. I bowed to the spectre, & received such a galvanic return, that I thought something of running out for some officer of the Humane Society, & getting a supply of hot water & blankets to resuscitate this melancholy corpse. But knowing the nature of these foggy English, & that they are not altogether inpenetrable, I began a sociable talk, and happening to make mention of Charles Lamb, and alluding to the warmth of feeling with which that charming punster is regarded in America, Mr Moxon lighted up—grew cordial—hearty;—& going into the heart of the matter—told me that he (Lamb) was the best fellow in the world to "get drunk with" (I use his own words) & that he had many a time put him to bed. He concluded by offering to send me a copy of his works (not Moxon's poetry, but Lamb's prose) which I have by me, now. It so happened, that on the passage over, I had found a copy of Lamb in the ship's library—& not having previously read him much, I dived into him, and was delighted—as every one must be with such a rare humorist & excellent hearted man. So I was very sincere with Moxon, being fresh from Lamb. He enquired particularly concerning you—earnestly spoke in admiration of " T w o Years Before the Mast"—& told me of the par-

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ticular gratification it had afforded particular persons of his acquaintance—including Mr. Rogers, the old Nestor, who poetically appreciated the scenic sea passages, describing ice, storms, Cape Horn, & all that. About the "whaling voyage"—I am half way in the work, & am very glad that your suggestion so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of a book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this. Give my compliments to Mrs. Dana, and remember me to your father. Sincerely yours H Melville To Evert Duyckinck went letters Melville had written in Paris and London: Paris Dec id 1849 My dear Mr. Duyckinck, I could almost whip myself that after receiving your most kind & friendly letter, I should suffer so long an interval to go by without answering it. But what can you expect of me? I have served persons the nearest to me in like manner. Travelling takes the wit out of one's pen as well as the cash out of one's purse.—Thank you for the papers you sent me. The other evening I went to see Rachel—& having taken my place in the "que" (how the devil do you spell it?) or tail—& having waited there for full an hour—upon at last arriving at the ticket-box—the woman there closed her little wicket in my face—& so the "tail" was cut off. Now my traveling "tail" has been cut off in like manner, by the confounded state of the Copyright Question in England. It has prevented me from receiving an unmerited supply of cash—I am going home within three weeks or so.—But I have not failed to enjoy myself & learn somewhat, notwithstanding. Give my best remembrances to your brother. Tell him I stumbled upon an acquaintance of his—a book dealer in the Strand. Tell him that Davidson proved a good fellow, & that we took some punch together at the Blue Posts.—Mr Delf I was not so happy as to see when I called there. But I may see him on my return. My compliments to Mrs Duyckinck & all your pleasant family, & believe me Sincerely yours H Melville.

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London, Dec 14, 49. My Dear Duyckinck—I meant to send this to you by a Havre packet— but learning more about her—did not. So I have kept the note by me, & send it to you now with a supplement, a sequel, & my "last convictions," which as an author, you will duly value.—I sail hence on the 21st Inst.— and am only detained now by reason of some business. Yesterday being at Mr. Bentley's I enquired for his copies of the last "Literary Worlds" —but they had been sent on to Brighton—so I did not see your say about the book Redbum, which to my surprise (somewhat) seems to have been favorably received. I am glad of it—for it puts money into an empty purse. But I hope I shall never write such a book again—tho' when a poor devil writes with duns all around him, & looking over the back of his chair—& perching on his pen & diving in his ink-stand—like the devils about St. Anthony—what can you expect of that poor devil? —What but a beggarly "Redburn!" And when he attempts anything higher—God help him & save him! for it is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow balloon—for a hollow purse makes the poet sink—witness "Mardi." But we that write & print have all our books predestinated— & for me, I shall write such things as the Great Publisher of Mankind ordained ages before he published "The World"—this planet, I meannot the Literary Globe.—What a madness & anguish it is, that an author can never—under no conceivable circumstances—be at all frank with his readers.—Could I, for one, be frank with them—how would they cease their railing—those at least who have railed.—In a little notice of "The Oregon Trail" I once said something "critical" about another man's book—I shall never do it again. Hereafter I shall no more stab at a book (in print, I mean) than I would stab at a man.—I am but a poor mortal, & admit that I learn by experience & not by divine intuitions. Had I not written & published "Mardi," in all likelihood, I would not be as wise as I am now, or may be. For that thing was stabbed at (I do not say through)—& therefore, I am the wiser for it.—But a bit of note paper is not large enough for this sort of writing—so no more of it. Pardon it, & know me to be yours. H Melville. I this morning did myself the pleasure of calling on Mrs. Daniel for the first. I saw her, & also two very attractive young ladies. Had you seen these young ladies, you would have never told Mrs. Duyckinck of it. You must on no account tell Mrs. Welford of this; for those nymphs were her sisters. H. M. That Melville should report to Evert Duyckinck his enthusiasm and disappointment in his effort to see the famous French actress Rachel is natural, since the theatre was one of the vital interests of

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those who gathered in the famous Duyckinck basement at 20 Clinton Place, where actors were welcomed with other practitioners of the arts. The record of Melville's stay in London is full of theatre news. This interest seems to have lessened with the years. When I asked my mother if he went to the theatre often, she said, "No" But high, individual genius still compelled him. He went to see Bernhardt twice, she said. The journal of his trip abroad is also full of visits to churches. My mother once said, "I never knew him to go to church but twice that I can remember—All Souls' Unitarian." Theatre and church were closely associated in his mind. It shows what he asked of Theatre—and of Church. Melville's purse, as he had complained to Duyckinck, was empty indeed. In a letter to Nathaniel P. Willis, written from London, December 14, he frankly gives the practical reasons for cutting short his tour, mixed with an effort at self-consolation, jocose but halfhearted: I very much doubt whether Gabriel enters the portals of Heaven without a fee to Peter the porter—so impossible is it to travel without money. Some people (999 in 1000) are very unaccountably shy about confessing to a want of money, as the reason why they do not do this or that; but, for my part, I think it such a capital clincher of a reason for not doing a thing, that I out with it, at once—for, who can gainsay it? And, what more satisfactory or unanswerable reason can a body give, I should like to know? Besides—though there are numbers of fine fellows, and hearts of blood, in the world, whom Providence hath blest with purses furlongs in length—yet the class of wealthy people are, in the aggregate, such a mob of gilded dunces, that, not to be wealthy carries with it a certain distinction and nobility. The youthful David Davidson, Wiley's London agent, wrote blithely to George Duyckinck of his meeting with Melville on the eve of his departure for home. Another friend, George Adler, the German philosopher and lexicographer, Melville's fellow traveler, gave George Duyckinck his ideas on the subject of Melville's home-going, with other comments of interest. David Davidson to George Duyckinck, December 24, 1849: I am very much obliged to you for an introduction to Herman Melville Esq.—we passed two evenings together which considering the dinners and breakfasts he had to do here was wonderfully fortunate—I suppose I was not exactly the kind of man to bring him out—still we had a pleasant brace of evenings, one at the Mitre Tavern, Fleet St. where we sat right opposite to Dr. Johnson's corner in which there was a man eating stewed mutton for dinner with his pint of 'af n'af at six

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o'clock in the evening—Doing our well done steaks we adjourned (by omnibus) to the "Blue Posts" Cork Street, Burlington Arcade and had a pint of real punch at the very table you, and Boot lare (Butler) and I blue posted a dinner once upon a time. The second evening was at the Blue Posts for the entire thing commencing on beefsteaks and ending on empty pitchers, or in other words from six till half past elevendamages—paid by Melville 14/2 sterling. We asked each other in the small smoking room—which we had to ourselves with a fine fireWhere,—said he—Where—said I—where said we both together—where in America can you find such a place to dine and punch as this? We talked of you, of several New Yorkers, some books, his affairs, and a tour he had made. He has succeeded most admirably in his business here and leaves tomorrow in the Independence. He went up the Rhine, to Paris and otherwise did a small tour. George Adler to George Duyckinck, from Paris, February 16, 1850: Our friend Mr. Melville has, I hope, long ago reached his home again safely, and you will have gained from him an account of our voyage and peregrinations in England and London. I regretted his departure very much; but all I could do to check and fix his restless mind for a while at least was of no avail. His loyalty to his friends at home and the instinctive impulse of his imagination to assimilate and perhaps to work up into some beautiful chimaeras (which according to our eloquent lecturer on Plato here constitute the essence of poetry and fiction) the materials he has already gathered in his travels, would not allow him to prolong his stay.— The winter here has been one of unusual gaiety, operas, spectacles, balls in abundance to supply our pleasure-and-excitement-loving population with amusement. The Prophete, which I had the pleasure to hear, and in which the magnificence of scenic effect is far beyond any thing I have ever seen, is still frequently produced and the place of its representation is thronged by hundreds of eager spectators. Madle Rachel I have not yet seen. It is a treat as yet prospective. Madame Sonntag, I see by the papers is also here and is about giving a series of concerts. T o a man, however, that is fond of literary or scientific pursuits, by far the most fascinating attractions are the lectures at the colleges and other public institutions, where every department of human knowledge is amply provided for and ably represented . . . Melville was headed for home when Dr. Amos Nourse expressed his sentiments in a letter of gratitude for the generosity of his friend, Judge Shaw, and took the occasion to indulge in "literary" comment. He •wrote from Bath, January 18, i8jo:

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Many thanks for your kind letter & the accompanying check for $364. W e were glad to hear that Lizzie is so soon to be made happy by the return of her darling husband—I have just been reading, & with great delight too, his last book, unless indeed he has written another since—I mean "Redburn." Few men have a talent like him for getting up readable books—No doubt his recent travels or rambles will have furnished him material for another vol. or two—I take it he gets good pay from his publishers—better at least than poor Goldsmith, about whom I have just been reading, used to get from his—Irving has given us a biography of G . that is truly delightful . . . Melville, home at last, made his own modest gifts, suited to individual tastes. On a Sunday afternoon soon after his return he wrote to his mother-in-law: M y dear Mrs. Shaw: I am sure you will not refuse to gratify me, by accepting a little present which Sammie brings with him. I thought of you while away, and hope you will receive it as a token of my having remembered you.—It is called a "University Bread Trencher" and has recently been generally introduced among English families. Some three or four centuries ago this article was used in the University Dining Halls. So that the present fashion is only the revival of a very ancient one. I shall feel myself very much flattered if you will occasionally use it—(if it be only once a year.) Samuel will instruct you more particularly touching the mode of using it. That interesting young Collegian has given us all great pleasure from his visit, which I hope he will often renew. Lizzie joins with me and the family in begging to be remembered to all under your roof. Sincerely Yours H Melville. I send Lemuel a little medal (not silver) which I bought in the famous cathedral of Cologne. Food came naturally to the mind when one thought of Hope Shaw. Even a critical and frivolous "socialite" of the 1850 season had to acknowledge the culinary excellence of the Judge's table. Louisa Minot wrote her friend, Jane Sedgwick, January 13, 1850: I spent Friday evening at Mr Judge Shaws, my first appearance in the gay world this season, if gay it can be called this solemn collection of representatives from the country, towns, standing about in the corners, & rows of their wives & daughters sitting along the wall on sofas, to which they seemed to be as firmly attached, as the casters & cushions . . . The supper was excellent, & in fine taste, & I enjoyed it very much . . .

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Melville to Evert Duyckinck, February 2, 1850: My Dear Duyckinck—Tho' somewhat unusual for a donor, I must beg to apologize for making you the accompanying present of "Mardi." But no one who knows your library can doubt, that such a choice conservatory of exotics & other rare things in literature, after being long enjoyed by yourself, must, to a late posterity, be preserved intact by your descendants. How natural then—tho' vain—in your friend to desire a place in it for a plant, which tho' now unblown (emblematically, the leaves, you perceive, are uncut) may possibly—by some miracle, that is—flower like the aloe, a hundred years hence—or not flower at all, which is more likely by far, for some aloes never flower. Again: (as the divines say) political republics should be the asylum for the persecuted of all nations; so, if Mardi be admitted to your shelves, your bibliographical Republic of Letters may find some contentment in the thought, that it has afforded refuge to a work, which almost everywhere else has been driven forth like a wild, mystic Mormon into shelterless exile. The leaves, I repeat, are uncut—let them remain so—and let me supplementaryly hint, that a bit of old parchment (from some old Arabic M.S.S. on Astrology) tied round each volume, & sealed on the back with a Sphynx, & never to be broken till the aloe flowers—would not be an unsuitable device for the bookbinders of "Mardi."—That book is a sort of dose, if you please—(tho', in the present case, charitably administered in three parts, instead of two) and by way of killing the flavor of it, I hurry to follow it up with a fine old spicy duodecimo mouthful in the shape of "Hudibras" which I got particularly for yourself at Stibbs's in the Strand—8c a little marvel that your brother George overlooked so enticing a little volume during his rummagings in the same shop.—Pray, glance at the title page, & tell me, if you can, what "Black Boy" that was in Paternoster Row. My curiosity is excited, and indeed aggravated & exacerbated about that young negro. Did the late Mr. Baker have a small live Nubian standing at his shop door, like the moccasined Indian of our Bowery tobacconist? I readily see the propriety of the Indian—but in that "Black Boy" I perceive no possible affinity to books—unless, by the way, Mr. Baker dealt altogether in blackletter,—Thomas the Rhymer, Lydgate, & Battle Abbey Directories.— Are they not delicious, & full flavored with suggestiveness, these old fashioned London imprints? So much for No. 1 & No. 2.—No. 3 is a bronze medal which I mean for your brother George, if he will gratify me by accepting such a trifling token of my sense of his kindness in giving me an "outfit" of guide-books. It comes from a mountainous defile of a narrow street in

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the Latín Quarter of Paris, where I disintered it from an old antiquary's cellar, which I doubt not connected, somehow, with the Catacombs & the palace of Thermes. Numbers 4 & 5 are two medals (warranted not silver) which I wish little Evert & Henry to keep by way of remembrances that I remembered them, even while thirty feet under water. They come from the Thames Tunnel. No. 6 (which brings up the rear of this valuable collection) is a bottle stopper from Cologne, for yourself. Do not despise it—there is a sermon in it. Shut yourself up in a closet, insert the stopper into a bottle of Sour Claret, & then study that face. Wishing you a merry Saturday night, & a serene Sunday morrow, I am, my Dear Duyckinck Truly Yours H Melville. I return, with my best thanks, to your brother, three of the books he loaned me. I can not account for "Cruchley's" accident in the back. —The Guide books for Northern & Central Italy are neither stolen, lost, sold, or mislaid. I will, I think, satisfactorily account for them when I see your brother. They are safe. In another letter to Duyckinck (New York, March 7, 1850) Melville tells one thing directly about himself and also mentions the green jacket that caused him embarrassment in punctilious London. He had noted in his journal the previous December: ". . . went & bought a Paletot in the Strand, so as to look decent—for I find my green coat plays the devil with my respectability here." My Dear Duyckinck: I hasten to return you the tickets which you were so good as to send last evening. I should have gone—as I love music—were it not that having been shut up all day, I could not stand being shut up all the evening—so I mounted my green jacket & strolled down to the Battery to study the stars. Yours H. Melville. This love of music never seems to have been fully satisfied. My mother was given a very few piano lessons as a girl, but she attained to so slight proficiency that she herself knew enough to be ashamed when her father proudly asked her to play for visitors. If the one piece of music the beginning of which she remembered, and used to show off with amused derision to her daughters,-was a sample of the others she learned, the teacher's taste was mediocre indeed. The "piece" was of the te-dum, te-dum, te-dum, te-dee variety. Rhythm it had, of a monotonous sort. My mother used also to deride the rhythm with which her father would recite, while pacing the floor, certain verses he had written, looking for approbation, she thought, from his wife and daughters. These

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must have been lines from Clarel, published in 1876, whose swinging meter, it is generally agreed, is more suited to the ballad than to the subject of this poem. She would have been pretty young to be critical of any verse published in Battle Pieces ten years earlier. There is a vague, haunting memory I have of a guitar with a blue ribbon that he was anxious to have her learn to play. Whether she ever learned a few chords I do not know: the guitar vanished, and the memory fades. If I had read Pierre early in life, I might have had an incentive to ask questions about Isabel's guitar. I wish I could convey the amusement, the almost affectionate amusement, with which my mother criticized her father in certain matters: so one might criticize a child, as much as to say, "you and I know better about this." She never condoned sarcasm or irascibility, and she could be at times half right and half wrong. As when 1 put the question to her, "Was he at all interested in music?" She simply said, "Liked it but did not know anything about it, no special interest." The facts seem to belie part of this at least. On June 27, 1850, Melville wrote Richard Bentley, his London publisher, about his plans for a new book. His letter reveals his feeling of financial insecurity and contains a curiously inadequate forecast of what would emerge when he set about writing Moby Dick later in the year at Fittsfield, Massachusetts. My Dear Sir,—In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer. Should you be inclined to undertake the book, I think it will be worth to you /200. Could you be positively put in possession of the copyright, it might be worth to you a larger sum—considering its great novelty; for I do not know that the subject treated of has ever been worked up by a romancer; or, indeed, by any writer, in any adequate manner. But as things are, I say £ 200, because that sum was given for "White Jacket"; but it does not appear, as yet, that you have been interfered with in your publication of that book; & therefore there seems reason to conclude, that, at /200, "White Jacket" must have been, in some degree, profitable to you . . . Being desirous of early arranging this matter in London,—so as to lose no time, when the book has passed thro' the Harpers' press here—

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I beg, Mr Bentley, that you at once write me as to your views concerning it. Circumstances make it indispensable, that if the book suits you at the sum above-mentioned, that on the day of sale, you give your note for that sum—at four months say—to whomever I depute to ratify the arrangement with you. Will you be so good as to tell me when you write, what has been the sale of "White Jacket" thus far? . . . So much for business.—I had a prosperous passage across the water last winter; & embarking from Portsmouth on Christmas morning, carried the savor of the plum-puddings & roast turkey all the way across the Atlantic . . .

CHAPTER

SIX

DEEP PEALS AND LIGHT REVELRY New York had proved too busy, too social, too disturbing, too expensive. The late summer of i8$o found Herman Melville and his family in Pittsfield,Massachusetts, visiting (or more probably, boarding with) his cousin Robert, Uncle Thomas' son, who was running "Melville House" (later the "Broadhall" of the Morewoods) as a select boarding-house. The scene was familiar. Herman sought there the "grass-growing mood" he felt was necessary to successful authorship— a mood he seldom if ever was able to achieve. Little did he know then the stimulating friendship that was to be his before the summer was over, a friendship more tonic even than the quiet pushing of growing grass. Nathaniel Hawthorne, his wife Sophia, and their children, Una and Julian, had settled earlier in the year in the little "Red Shanty'''' at Lenox, seven miles from Pittsfield. There Hawthorne had receivea a gift of champagne from his friend Lewis William Mansfield, to whom he wrote June 17, 1850: I have not y e t tasted the wine, but reserve it for some specially bright and festive occasion. If a man of genius, as has n o w and then happened, should sit at our humble board, I shall let loose a cork, and talk over y o u r book, and tell him that the Poet's wine is sparkling in his goblet.

In August, Evert Duyckinck and his friend Cornelius Mathews, a New York writer, arrived in the Berkshires for a vacation. Duyckinck was so enthusiastic about his experiences and such a faithful recorder of daily events that the series of letters he wrote (chiefly to his wife, Margaret) photograph the visible surfaces accurately and pleasingly, and incidentally contain pertinent comments on some of the characters of the social scene. Hotel—Pittsfield Mass. Saturday morning Dear wife, Rattled over the 160 miles to this place last evening b y l/2 past 10—passed the night at the Hotel, Melville making w a y for us at

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or near his house this morning. Met Dudley D. Field in the cars who has cut out for us all the celebrities of Stockbridge the beginning of the week. W e are to dine with him, visit Hawthorne, Monument Mountain &c &c. A beautiful region, pure & bracing mountain air— with a fine day before us—if I see it again it must be with two pair of eyes & you must be the spectacles. This is no letter but a note—in great haste Yours E A D. Kiss George & Henry for me. I have seen no "jumping Quakers" yet but will look out. Pittsfield Mass. Sunday Aug 4. 1850 M y dear wife: I dropped you a line yesterday in a parcel to the office which Melville says I must have been tempted to make up by the Yankee atmosphere. I had the proof sheets of Appleton's edition of Wordsworth's posthumous poem "The Prelude" with me to read & use at leisure in the paper. Mathews told me that Griswold was about to publish a whole book of it in his next week's magazine, so I concluded that my next week's paper should have its share & made up a parcel of mail with necessary directions at once. So you see that the Literary World can be edited at a distance of 160 miles—so that need be no obstacle to our settling here if you choose. And if you were here today I think the purity and sweetness of this mountain air would tempt you. It is simply delicious and every breath is an enjoyment. The country is a broken plain surrounded by ranges of mountains, of which from the spot where I am looking over the spires of pleasant Pittsfield the cleft two humped Saddleback is the hugest wonder. But I wont describe scenery or tell you of the dark lakes set in the hollows or the murmuring brooks of the meadows, whose cool pebbly sound is only surpassed by the breezes in the tree tops above them. I will tell you nothing of the languishing elms whose foliage swoons in the luxury of air. T o tell of these things to a lady encased in hot bricks in N e w York would be unprovoked cruelty were I not bound to a full and faithful account of my wanderings and did I not hope to make a convert to that beautiful part of the world the country. I assure you that Poets have made no mistake. The air is balm and a great many other things—Here they have no thermometers. Fancy yourself like Mrs. Herman Melville in a great flapping straw hat tied under the chin, floating about with the Zephyrs in blue, pink or lilac—or like the gallant Mrs. Morewood in linen sack armed with a bait box and fishing rod for the finny sport—or scouring the plains, instead of the teacups like Atalanta—or with Mrs. Allan! but I forbear— The house where we live, Melville's is a rare place—an old family

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mansion, wainscoted and stately, with large halls & chimneys—quite a piece of mouldering rural grandeur—The family has gone down & this is their last season. The farm has been sold. Herman Melville knows every stone & tree & will probably make a book of its features. The old lady, his aunt, shows you a vial of the Boston tea, brought home by his grandfather in his shoes from the famous Boston tea party in the harbor. As yet I do not sleep there but am at home during the day—The spot where I have turned in to write this letter & where I sleep for a night or so is a small farmers house close by. The rooms are very neat and comfortable. A print of her sensual looking Majesty Queen Caroline hangs above me. Tell Katy Melville's is a nice house for that nice poet Longfellow boarded here a year or two since and Oliver Wendell Holmes' cottage is in sight. The Berkshire pigs are large if we may judge from the unwieldy mother in the sty & the purity and quantity of eggs at breakfast are proof of the character of the fowls. Horses and drives and trees and happy looking houses everywhere about—and Mr. Field has promised to show us a vast deal more at Stockbridge. We go there as I told you to-morrow—Julia Bryant [daughter of William Cullen Bryant] I believe is there & we shall look up Hawthorne who lives in the neighborhood. A drive yesterday afternoon to Pontoosuc would have conquered all affection for bricks & mortar. What is Pontoosuc? It is not a mountain but a lake and you descend upon it and wind about it by pleasant roads. There are two voices Wordsworth says—one of the mountains, one of the sea—I have stuttered out one and may you have a favorable echo from Evert [Jr.] of the other—George & Henry I should like to tumble about in these bowls of cream here & have you abusing the city & crying "beautiful" and "enchanting" while you were with me as you should be—which you must be, as Paddy would say, the next time we separate—Yours, Evert. The Melville House Pittsfield Tuesday August 6. 1850 My dear wife, Monday came and the visit to Stockbridge with it. You drop down by the cars fifteen miles or so and find yourself on a lower level in a Chinese painted green saucer, with water, trees and verandahs, edged by blue mountains. W e found at the station house Oliver Wendell Holmes whom Mr Field had reached with his lion lasso. He was on the spot himself at Stockbridge and drove us to his cottage, convenient and rambling and pitched down in the verdure—There we saw

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Mrs. F. and the daughter a nice young lady. T h e family goes to Europe in the Pacific to be at Rome in the fall. I said they must look out for Mr Wolfe & Miss Panton—"Miss Panton?" said the daughter. I know a Miss Panton—They call her Cassy and Julia Bryant talks about her. T h e pleasant Julia had been there a week & gone away among the hills. Presently James T . Fields the Boston publisher drove up with his newly married wife and Nathaniel Hawthorne. A young whiskered Harry Sedgwick came on on horseback and we fell into line in three conveyances for Monument Mountain. You will find the legend and the view in Bryant's poems. It is a rough projection of the cliffs, scarred and blasted. W e took to our feet on its sides and strode upward Hawthorne and myself in advance, talking of the Scarlet Letter. As we scrambled over the rocks at the summit which surveys a wide range of country on either side, a black thunder cloud from the south dragged its ragged skirts toward us—the thunder rolling in the distance. T h e y talked of shelter and shelter there proved to be though it looked unpromising but these difficulties, like others, vanish on trial and a few feet of rock with a damp underground of mosses and decay actually sheltered publisher Fields curled whiskers, his patent leathers and his brides delicate blue silk. Dr Holmes cut three branches for an umbrella and uncorked the champagne which was drunk from a silver mug. T h e rain did not do its worst and we scattered over the cliffs, Herman Melville to seat himself, the boldest of all, astride a projecting bowsprit of rock while little Dr Holmes peeped about the cliffs and protested it affected him like ipecac. Hawthorne looked wildly about for the great Carbuncle. Mathews read Bryant's poem. T h e exercise was glorious. W e shed rain like ducks and for wet feet—I boated about in Mr Fields parlors on the return in his stockings and slippers—Then came the dinner—a three hour's business from turkey to ice cream, well moistened by the way. D r Holmes said some of his best things and drew the whole company out by laying down various propositions of the superiority of Englishmen. Melville attacked him vigorously. Hawthorne looked on and Fields his publisher smiled with internal satisfaction underneath his curled whiskers at the good tokens of a brilliant poem from Holmes in a few days at the Yale College celebration. Joel Tyler Headley dropped in with his brother-in-law—I forget his name but he was shot at the Astor Riots. It was a merciless thing to get us off from such a dinner in the afternoon to the Icy Glen, a break in one of the hills of tumbled huge, damp, mossy rocks in whose recesses ice is said to be found all the year round. Headley led the way and a scramble it was which you would not have affected—nasty and sublime though the ladies get up torch light parties here—we came out on the peaceful fields of the Housatonic and skirt-

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ing a meadow crossed the river to our host's again. Talk and tea and a tall Mrs. Sedgewick and a cross examination which I did not stand very well on Hope Leslie and Magawisca—and at 10 o'clock the railwayhome, a short walk under the stars and we turned in at this Melville house—a vigorous Creole lady & her husband having departed in the forenoon. Mr Field's hospitalities & kindness were of the rarest & altogether it was a rare meeting was it not— The best part of the scenery they say is yet to be seen—Salisbury Lakes I think they call them and the ascent of the Dome &c. We were urged to visit these at once but this I thought was a day to be kept by itself and I shall need your help in discovering the rest. I wish you could see the view from my window now & breathe this fine air. It is warm but you do not swelter—If you were here with the children I could be content to remain till October—You must see Pittsfield—The fat woman on Davis' stoop does not compare—I am in earnest—with Saddleback and the small birds sing sweeter than the Sunday newsboys or the demented milk man. Headley is to visit us today. He has been looking for Darley & Henry. As he will remain here some six weeks they cannot do better than to overhaul him at Stockbridge. T o morrow we shall drive over some six or eight miles to Lebanon & look up Mrs. Long & Dambman & get something out of the Shakers for you and the children. Another day for a visit to Hawthorne & Monday, at the latest, a call upon dear Margaret. Hers truly Evert A Duyckinck. News of this active August vacation became widespread, as a letter Richard H. Dana, Jr., wrote Evert Duyckinck on October i, i8$o, shows. Dana had heard through James T. Fields of the reading of Bryant's " 'Monument Mountain' on the very top of the Original," and his comment throws light on this man who had a rather special place in Melville's feelings: "There must have been many clever things said & many a hearty laugh engendered by them—But for my single self,' / would rather read 'Monument Mountain' alone, & in my study, or any where else, rather than on the mountain itself. The most I could consent to, while looking at the very thing itself, would be to let the idealized mount throw its shadow across my mind, spirit-like—while I was but half conscious of it. You & Mr. M. may laugh at me; but so it is:— I am very sensitive on such matters." Evert Duyckinck again mentions the excursion to Monument Mountain in a letter to his brother from Pittsfield, August 7, 1850: My dear George, This is a glorious region & had I anticipated its resources I should have insisted on your presence—We have had fine weather & feasted on the land—literally the great event being an excur-

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sion to Stockbridge last Monday on an invitation from Dudley D. Field who we met going up in the cars & who a la Cujnmings, slaughtered for us not only turkeys and beeves but got up a battle of lions on Monument Mountain. W e had Dr. Holmes whose grounds adjoin this Melville land and Hawthorne from Lenox and J . T . Fields from Boston and Headley (in the afternoon) & our full party. All came out strong—as you may imagine. We had a thunder shower on the mountain & a visit to the Icy Glen &c&c—a brilliant day. Headley came over to see us yesterday. Today we go to Lebanon & to morrow will visit Hawthorne & dine with Headley at Stockbridge. . . . Allan Melville came up last night & says the heat of the city is still oppressive. Here every breath is a new luxury and every look out a fresh discovery. We are in a line old country mansion on the best site I have seen in the region. Melville has a new book mostly done—a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the whale fishery,—something quite new. Remember me to the ladies. I shall write immediately on my return, when, if not before I expect to hear from you—yours truly Evert A. Duyckinck. Pittsfield Mass. Thursday Aug 8. 1850 M y dear wife, I write this in bed between five and six A M—so you see that I think of you the first of all things in the day and another thing how much wider awake I am in the country than the city. I have always told you so. In the city I am a martyr to the depressing influence of baked bricks but here I would rise with the lark if there was one. It is a glorious place for a rustication when you get ready to turn out with me; exhilarating mountain air, new drives over excellent roads in all directions, the finest views of wood, lake, the Taconic range—not so much sublimity perhaps as the Alps but a wonderful variety of beauty. Fanny Kemble knew what she was about when she cottaged and horsed herself in this region. The mountain beauty of the drive over the Taconic to Lebanon is a thing to enjoy. You may pass through a cloud on the summit and fancy yourself in the Ossianic Scotch Highlands and then you are out upon the sunshine of the broken valleys. You go somewhere by one road and come back by another and cut across by a third. Thus we went to Lebanon. Herman Melville drove a pair of horses and in a light carriage behind them were besides, his wife, Mathews & self. Allan who came up the night before was with his wife in a one horse wagon. W e passed through a shower but showers in Berkshire only improve the prospect & before the rain was over we descended upon the huge rambling hotel at the Springs. Half Broadway was promenading there after dinner. Mrs. Long & Mrs Dambman came

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out of some pigeon holes in the third floor. Mrs L had a good deal to say about Edward and Mrs D told me as proof of the healthiness of the spot that she had gained four or five pounds and she looks it! The meeting with Mrs. Allan was quite impressive—By the way Mr Headley says he would give a thousand dollars if that boy he expects in a few days were safely here. The mountains are in labor. There were 250 fashionables at the house & Mr Langdon's 14 trunks, 20 carpet bags &c had just left for Newport—There is a new part of the house where ten dollars a week are paid—It is a curious old chest of drawers, spring, baths & all which Mr. Dambman took us over in a very matter of fact way. The rain was over & we dropped along in a new direction to the Shaker villages. Sarah Ann showed us the baskets &c and I bought the best for you and some for the others & Allan M gave three snug little boxes for the children. An old Shakeress with a dry Yankee twist in her voice took us to the bed rooms &c and explained to us a curious camel's hump raised in the middle of the bed, lengthwise, a kind of imitation Berkshire mountain range where two sisters slept together—that they should not roll on one another. We felt of this hump but were told it was only the bed clothes. Old Shakeresses speak plain Saxon. Herman M saw a long handled brush at a bed head & asked its object "Why I guess it's for him to scratch himself with when he itches—" This was at Lebanon. We passed on among the 7000 Shaker acres by the immaculate yellow houses, glazed like a pail, the red barns and the bricky natives, by well cultivated fields to the Hancock village where we saw the huge barn & where Mrs Morewood driving a pair of horses with three ladies had come on to meet us—There's a woman with a snapper. She is to be the owner of this house next year & I must tell you more about her—Headley came on the other day & took dinner with us—I wish Kate could see this ice cream & tipsy cake—& invited us to banquet with him at Stockbridge today. An extraordinary splendid day & we are off at eight, calling on Hawthorne at Lenox &c &c. This is my fourth letter to you. Yours my dear wife Evert A Duyckinck. Later in the day—this same August 8 when Duyckinck wrote in the early morning of calling on Hawthorne—Sophia Hawthorne wrote her sister Elizabeth Peabody a hurried note, characterizing the visitors who had come from Pittsfield to see her husband, and telling of some of the summer's events. My dear Lizzy, Last Saturday Mr & Mrs Field came & invited Mr Hawthorne & me to join an excursion up Monument Mountain, (which lies like a headless Sphinx opposite our windows.) & then to dine—in company with Herman Melville (Typee) Mr Cornelius Mathews—Mr

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Evert Duyckinck—& one more—I forget his name—Also Dr Holmes & J . T . Fields were to be there-& Mr. Headley—author of Napoleon & his Marshals. Mr. Hawthorne went with Mr. J . T . Fields, who called for him in a comfortable chariot & two—& brought him back at night in the same sumptuous manner. They went up the mountain—dined, & in the afternoon went through the Ice Glen—which Mr Hawthorne described as looking as if the Devil had torn his way through a rock & left it all jagged behind him. All the N e w York gentlemen told Mr Hawthorne they should call & see him & so here they are—now down to the lake. Mr Typee is interesting in his aspect—quite—I see Fayaway in his face. Mr Mathews (Big Abel) is a very chatty gossiping body. Mr. Duyckinck—a trim dutch but very gentle, agreeable gentlemen. S.A.H. I must wind up quick as the Gentlemen will soon be here by whom I will send this, it is so difficult to send to the village. It was this visit that Hawthorne chose as a "specially bright and festive occasion" to open some of the champagne sent him earlier in the year by his friend Lewis William Mansfield. When he listed in his American Notebook those who were present—"Messrs. Duyckinck, Mathews, Melville, Melville Jr."—his friendship with Herman was but a few days old. Duyckinck too recorded the event, in his graphic way high-lighting Hawthorne as host: The Melville House, Pittsfield August 9, 1850 My dear wife, I have half a dozen resolutions today to be at home by the first cars and if I were to consult my own inclinations I should but there are several circumstances which determine Monday as the natural terminus of this extraordinary expedition; and if I were to put you en rapport with them by telegraph I feel that you would tell me to stay. So I must e'en be content to be away from you till Monday when you may look for me between 3 & 4 o'clock P.M. I heartily want to be with you. Yesterday after writing to you I turned out for the day's trip to Stockbridge &c. You cannot imagine anything finer in the way of enjoyment of mountain scenery than the turnings and windings among these hills. You may take any point of the compass, any variety of sky and find the greater beauties of nature everywhere around you—what Trenton is to the waters Berkshire is to fields, lake and hill side. With a cool rustling in the trees and a good pair of horses before us we wound about and around to Lenox—Here we saw Fanny Kemble's hired cottage and elsewhere on Hawthorne's lake the knoll she had selected to build on. Lenox, by the way, has one odd association. The stone jail is pieced on to the hotel; good security to the land lord for his tavern bills—Hawthorne we found on one of the most purely beautiful spots of the region. His house is a small red farm house but his wife, who

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resembles Margaret Fuller in appearance though more robust than she was, has fitted it up with great taste—particularly a little room or passage or closet or oratory which looks out upon the view—a fresh rippling lake at the foot of descending meadows, encircled by the mountains in the distance—Fine art prints savoring of Italy hung on low walls and a fine engraving of the Transfiguration presented by Emerson. Hawthorne is a fine ghost in a case of iron—a man of genius and he looks it and lives it—he gave us some Heidsieck which a literary friend had presented to him, popping the corks in his nervous way. Then his children. They are miracles of bone & muscle. The boy, perhaps four years old, overflowing with life—his ringlets and quick electric ways convinced me that his father had drawn his portrait in the picture of the little girl in that fanciful romance The Scarlet Letter. We rambled to the lake to the last moment and dropped down upon Headley at the hotel at Stockbridge who saluted us with a volley of bottles at the dinner table. It all went off in excellent style. The newsboy brought us the morning papers on the piazza & the best thing we found in them was that you were enjoying pleasant weather in the city. Headley has a letter from Darley & looks for him & Henry next week. They will find themselves in clover. A call upon Mrs Field and back again by new routes over the hills, coming with an ever new surprize upon the plain of Pittsfield—I was surprized yesterday to get a note from Butler at Great Barrington some 15 or 20 miles off. T o day we have rain but the roads are so good that we shall hardly keep within doors. It has broken up a pic-nic for which all the preparations had been made by the inexhaustible Mrs Morewood who understands the art of making a toil of pleasure; but that may come off to morrow, somewhere on the Gulf road. On Sunday I meditate a walk or drive to the Shakers who are then at their spasms and on Monday I shall crown all in your arms—I send George a letter as he should have one too. Tell Henry he must help me in unpacking the trunk. Yours my dear Margaret Evert A Duyckinck. Evert Duyckinck departed August 12 with the manuscript of Melville's essay, "Hawthorne I24> I2(5 , i5'. "53-'54. 159, 164-165, 179, 195, 196, 204, 214, 215, 217, 220, 221, 226, 232-234, 236, 237. 238 Melville, Catherine Bogart (sister-inlaw), 212, 239, 240 Melville, Catherine G., see Hoadley, Catherine Gansevoort Melville Melville, Elizabeth (Bessie) (daughter), 146, 148, 188, 196, 215, 218, 223, 229, 230, 239, 243, 245, 250, 255, 256, 260, 261, 262, 263, 286, 288, 291 Melville, Elizabeth Shaw (wife), 29-30, 31, 43, 80, 88, 101, 133, 144, 150, 151, 153, 162, 163, 166, 179, 189, 199, 235236; character, 30, 44-45, 134, 209, 219220; domestic routine, 48-50, 148, 204, 215, 219-220; and her children, 207208, 212, 217, 222-223, 227, 231, 250, 255-256; and her grand-children, 261, 288, 289, 290; and Herman, 50, 51-52, 55, 61-62, 74, 98, 113-114, 147, 159, 160, 170-171, 182, 183, 184-185, 200, 250, 255-256, 286, 288-289, 293; death, 291. See also Melville, Herman; Shaw, Lemuel Melville, Frances, see Thomas, Frances Melville Melville, Frances Priscilla (sister), 1, 9, 10, 48, 49, 51, 183, 195, 197, 214, 232, 238, 240, 242, 243, 244-245, 246, 254, 258, 263, 264 Melville, Françoise Fleury (aunt), 16 Melville, Gansevoort (brother), 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 34, 35 Melville, Helen Maria, see Griggs, Helen Maria Melville Melville, Herman, 79-80, 82, 85; ancestry, 279; character, 26, 56-57, 93, 98, 100, 216-217, 235—23 '9°, 197, 2 °5, 206, 212, 214, 218, 220, 221, 222, 237, 239, 2 4°, 247, 2 5 8 , 2 6 2 Melville House, Pittsfield, see "Broadhall" Melville Society, 295 Meteor, 182, 186, 189, 190 Milnes, Monckton, 65 Mitchell, Maria, 137 Monument Mountain (Berkshires), 80, 82, 84, 85, 121 Morewood, Agnes (great-niece), 258 Morewood, Helen G. (great-niece), viii Morewood, Margaret T . (great-niece), 2 59 Morewood, Maria Melville (niece), 217, 228-229, 244, 259 Morewood, Mrs. Sarah, 80, 85, 87, 96, 114-119 passim, 122, 123, 124-125, 133, 144, 149, 151, 170, 175-176, 201, 247 Morewood, William, 217, 228-229 Morris, William, 294 Morton, Mrs. Marcus, 50 Morton, Susan, 52, 54 Moulton, Mrs. Chandler, 278 Mount Greylock (Berkshires), 101, 112, 121, 126, 149 Moxon, Edward, 65, 66, 68, 69 Murray, Henry A., 295 Murray, John, 34 Naushon Island, 137 Newton, Massachusetts, 118, 131-132 New York City, 8, 205. See also specific streets and places by name New York Evening Post, 291 New York Male High School, 8, 9 New York State Bank, 13 New York Times, 290 North Adams, Massachusetts, 120, 122, 123, 170 Nourse, Amos, 193, 194 Nourse, Mary, 149 Osgood's Literary World, see Literary World Panton, Miss, 82 Parker, Judge Amasa J., 146, 164-165

310

GENERAL

Parker, Daniel P., 55 Parkman, Francis, Oregon Trail, 71 Parmelee, Mary Eleanor, 23-24 Payne, John, Vigil and Vision, quoted 290-291 Peabody, George, 183 Pearl Street, New York City, 2 Peebles, Mary L., 262 Pequod (Moby Dick), 127 Percival, Captain, 31 Percival, Maria, 53 Perry, Matthew, 151 Phillips, Wendell, 263 Philo Logos Society, 241 Pierce, Franklin, 145, 146, 147, 148, 160 Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 8, 22, 23, 80, 98, 102, 104, 120, 146, 153, 154, 166, 173, 188, 193, 286 Pittsfield Young Ladies' Institute, 143 Polk, James K., 26 Pollack, Mrs., 115, 118, 119, 121 Pollard, Capt., 137 Pontoosuc Lake, 81, 121, 123, 125 Quincy, Josiah, 31 Rachel, Madle, 70, 73 "Red Hill," N e w Hampshire, 44, 45 Red House, see Red Shanty Red Shanty, Lenox, Massachusetts, 79, 86-87, IOO-IOI Richmond, Massachusetts, 117 Richter, Jean Paul, 292; Titan, 203 Robertson, Agatha Hatch, 138-139, 144 Robertson, James., 138-139 Rogers, Samuel, 65, 69 Root, Dr. O. S., 133 Rudd and Carleton, 185 Russ, Herman Melville, 176 Russ, Oliver, 176 Russell, Henry, 274 Russell, William Clark, 272, 275, 277; An Ocean Tragedy, 274, 275; Wreck of the Grosvenor, 277 Saddleback Mountain (Berkshires), 80, 83, 88, 9j, 118, 119, 124; ascent of, 120-123 Sailors' Snug Harbor, 206, 247 Saint Lawrence, 20 Salisbury Lakes, 83 Salt, H. S., 277-278 Sampson, Lowe, Son and Co., 136 Sandwich Islands, 147 Savage, Miss, 54 Schiller, Johann C. F. von, 107 Scottish Art Review, 277-278 Scribner, Charles, 184

INDEX

Sedgwick, Henry, 82 Sedgwick, Mrs. Henry, 83 Shakers, 83, 85, 113, 116, 118 Shakespeare, William, quoted 35-36, 42; Melville on, 57-58, 59 Shaw, Elizabeth, see Melville, Elizabeth Shaw Shaw, Elizabeth Knapp, 30 Shaw, Hope Savage (mother-in-law), 30-31, 48, 74, 163, 217, 226; diary, 3031, 42, 144, 200-201, 215, 253 Shaw, John Oakes (brother-in-law), 136, 208 Shaw, Josephine MacC., 208 Shaw, Lemuel (father-in-law), 10, 66, 92, 136, 166-167, '79, 235> o n classical languages, 32-33; and Elizabeth, 30, 162, 171, 180-182; as family friend, 2, 12, 13, 14-15, 24; and his family, 31; as Herman's father-in-law, 48, 136— 137, 144, 159, 171, 180-182, 191; death, 194, 195 Shaw, Lemuel, Jr., 31, 51, 154, 156, 158, 165-166, 227, 239, 245, 250, 258, 259, 265 Shaw, Samuel Savage, 50, 53, 54, 55, 62, 74, 113, 154, 155-158, 159, 163, '99, 207, 215, 224 Shepherd, Daniel, 160, 173-175 Simon, Jean, quoted 201 Slicer, Thomas R., 290 Sloane, Thomas O'Connor, 293 Smith, J. E. A., 114, 116, 117, 133; Biographical Sketch of Herman Melville, manuscript quoted 33-34, 286; History of Pittsfield, 16 Sonntag, Madame, 73 Southgate, Bishop, 222 South Orange (New Jersey) Public Library, 293 Stanwix Hall, 241, 254 Starr, Fred, 231 Stedman, Arthur, 285, 287 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 292 Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 80, 81, 86, lr 4 , 143 Stoddard, Richard Henry, Recollections, Personal and Literary, 239 Stone, William L., Life of Joseph Brandt, 127 Street, Alfred Billings, 143, 243, 252 Street, Cliff, 59 Sullivan, Mrs., 50, 62 Sumner, Charles, 193 Taconic Mountain range, 84, 116, 121, 149

GENERAL

Tappan, Mr., 92, 1 1 2 Taughconic (guidebook), 142 Taylor, Bayard, 203; "valentine," 52 Taylor, John C., District School, 1 8 - 1 9 Ten Broeck and French, 22 Tennyson, Alfred, 23 Terence, 203 Thomas, Catherine Gansevoort (granddaughter), 280 Thomas, Eleanor Melville (granddaughter), 2j8, 265, 281, 292; memories of Melville, quoted 282-283 Thomas, Frances (granddaughter), 258, 2 6 1 , 2 8 1 - 2 8 2 , 293

Thomas, Frances Melville (daughter), '33-'34» '4 6 . i 88 - 196, 211, 21J, z>8, 2 2 2 , 223, 2 2 9 , 239, 240, 2 4 3 , 245, 2JO, 2 J I , 2J4, 2 J J, 2 j 8 , 260, 265, 280, 292

Thomas, Henry B. (son-in-law), 247, 2S«. 254> 2S9i 264. 2