Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

“The death of Herman Melville,” wrote Arthur Stedman, “came as a surprise to the public at large, chiefly because it revealed the fact that such a man had lived so long.” The Ne...

“And here again, not unreasonably, might invocation go up to those three Weird Ones, that tend Life’s loom. Again we might ask them, what threads are these, oh, ye Weird Ones, t...

May 12, he was dead. His countrymen celebrated his decease. _The Wisconsin,_ a newspaper published in Milwaukee, for example, published, on July 1, a florid tribute to his memor...

“And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I...

“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gentle awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian...

“You said you were married, I think? Well, I suppose it is wise, after all. It settles, centralises, and confirms a man, I have heard. Yes, it makes the world definite to him; i...

“In general terms we have been thus decided in asserting the great genealogical and real-estate dignity of some families in America, because in so doing we poetically establish...

“When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and...

“‘Why, they are cannibals!’ said Toby on one occasion when I eulogised the tribe. ‘Granted,’ I replied, ‘but a more humane, gentlemanly and amiable set of epicures do not probab...

“We are full of ghosts and spirits; we are as grave-yards full of buried dead, that start to life before us. And all our dead sires, verily, are in us; _that_ is their immortali...

“Oh, give me the rover’s life--the joy, the thrill, the whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into the saddle once more. I am sick of these terra firma toils and c...

“Ah, truant humour. But to me That vine-wreathed urn of Ver, in sea Of halcyons, where no tides do flow Or ebb, but waves bide peacefully At brim, by beach where palm trees grow...

“At the battle of Breviex in Flanders, my glorious old gossiping ancestor Froissart informs me, ten good knights, being suddenly unhorsed, fell stiff and powerless to the plain,...

“If you read of St. Peter’s, they say, and then go and visit it, ten to one, you account it a dwarf compared to your high-raised ideal. And, doubtless, Jonah himself must have b...

On a bleak and snowy November day in 1851, the Hawthorne family, with their trunks, got into a large farm wagon and drove away from the little red house. And with the departure...

“It is often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthly rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in on...

“If ever, my dear Hawthorne,” wrote Melville in the summer of 1851, “we shall sit down in Paradise in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able...

“As the vine flourishes, and the grape empurples close up to the very walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein; so do the sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its...

to come by. I think it is his first romance, and I believe it has never been reprinted here. It is the romance of his own boyhood. I mean _Redburn_. Any number of good pens will...