ton, Coleridge and Chesterfield, as well as Prometheus and Cinderella, Mahomet and Cleopatra, Madonnas and Houris, Medici and Mussulman, to strew carelessly across his pages. "Not in vain," says Melville of the idealisation of himself in the character of Pierre, "had he spent long summer afternoons in the deep recesses of his father's fastidiously picked and decorous library." Not in vain, either, had he been submitted to three years of elementary drill in the classics at the Albany Academy. "Not that as yet his young and immature soul had been accosted by the wonderful Mutes, and through the vast halls of Silent Truth, had been ushered into the full, secret, eternally inviolable Sanhedrim, where the Poetic Magi discuss, in glorious gibberish, the Alpha and Omega of the Universe," says Melville; "but among the beautiful imaginings of the second and third degree of poets he freely and comprehendingly ranged." Melville was always a wide if desultory reader, more and more interested after the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and the Burton with reference to whom he began his career in letters, in "remote and curious illusions, wrecks of forgotten fables, antediluvian computations, obsolete and unfamiliar problems, riddles that no living Edipus would care to solve." And this preoccupation-first made manifest in Mardi (1849)-must always stand in the way of his most typical writings ever becoming widely popular. His earliest known piece of juvenile composition is interesting as revealing the crude beginnings of one of the manners superbly mastered in parts of Moby-Dick. This early effusion, by revealing so crudely the defects of his qualities, reads as a dull parody of one of his most typical later manners.

With a Miltonic confidence in his own gifts, Melville came to view these earlier pieces as the first "earthly rubbish" of his "immense quarries of fine marble." Melville goes on to say that "no commonplace is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one's self of it into a book; for once trapped into a book, then the book can be put into the fire and all will be well." "But they are not always put into the fire," he said with regret. And because of his own laxity in cremation, his crude first fruits stalk abroad to accuse him.

At this early period, Melville had nothing very significant to say; but he seems to have been urged to say it with remorseless pertinacity. In Pierre, he satirises his youthful and reckless prolixity where he speaks of his manuscripts as being of such flying multitudes that "they were to be found lying all round the house; gave a great deal of trouble to the housemaids in sweeping; went for kindlings to the fires; and forever flitting out of the windows, and under the doorsills, into the faces of people passing the manorial mansion.”

Having nothing very particular to write about, he followed an ancient tradition, and wrote of love. In Pierre, which is Melville's spiritual autobiography, and in Pierre alone, does Melville elaborately busy himself with romantic affection. And in Pierre, his is no sugared and conventional preoccupation. He traces his own development through the love-friendship of boyhood, the miscellaneous susceptibility of adolescence, to a crucifixion in manhood between the images of his wife and his mother. His first Fragment from a Writing Desk seems to have been conceived at a time before his "innumerable wandering glances settled upon some one specific object."

His second Fragment from a Writing Desk concerns itself with an allegorical quest of elusive feminine loveliness: a kind of Coelebs in Search of a Wife, allegorised and crossed with Lalla Rookh. It survives, as has been said, only as a fragment of a Fragment. Its conclusion must remain a mystery until some old newspaper file disgorges its secrets. It begins as follows:

For the Democratic Press

FRAGMENTS FROM A WRITING DESK
No. 2

"Confusion seize the Greek!" exclaimed I, as wrathfully rising from my chair, I flung my ancient Lexicon across the room and seizing my hat and cane, and throwing on my cloak, I sallied out into the clearer air of heaven. The bracing coolness of an April evening calmed my aching temples, and I slowly wended my way to the river side. I had promenaded

the bank for about half an hour, when flinging myself upon the grassy turf, I was soon lost in revery, and up to the lips in sentiment.

I had not lain more than five minutes, when a figure effectually concealed in the ample folds of a cloak, glided past me, and hastily dropping something at my feet, disappeared behind the angle of an adjoining house, ere I could recover from my astonishment at so singular an occurrence.

"Cerbes!" cried I, springing up, "here is a spice of the marvellous!" and stooping down, I picked up an elegant little, rosecoloured, lavender-scented billet-doux, and hurriedly breaking the seal (a heart, transfixed with an arrow) I read by the light of the moon, the following:

"GENTLE SIR:

If my fancy has painted you in genuine colours, you will on the receipt of this, incontinently follow the bearer where she will lead you.

INAMORITA."

"The deuce I will!" exclaimed I,-"But soft!"-And I reperused this singular document, turned over the billet in my fingers, and examined the hand-writing, which was femininely delicate, and I could have sworn was a woman's. Is it possible, thought I, that the days of romance are revived?—No, "The days of chivalry are over!" says Burke.

As I made this reflection, I looked up, and beheld the same figure which had handed me this questionable missive, beckoning me forward. I started towards her; but, as I approached, she receded from me, and fled swiftly along the margin of the river at a pace which, encumbered as I was with my heavy cloak and boots, I was unable to follow; and which filled me with sundry misgivings, as to the nature of the being, who could travel with such amazing celerity. At last, perfectly breathless, I fell into a walk; which, my mysterious fugitive perceiving, she likewise lessened her pace, so as to keep herself still in sight, although at too great a distance to permit me to address her."

The hero hastens after his guide-but always she eludes him. Piqued by her repeated escapes, he stops in a rage, and relieves his feelings in "two or three expressions that savoured somewhat of the jolly days of the jolly cavaliers." And under the circumstances, he felt fully justified in his profanity. "What! to be thwarted by a woman! Peradventure; baffled by a girl? Confusion! It was too bad! To be outwitted, generaled, routed, defeated, by a mere rib of the earth? It could not be borne!" Recovering his temper, he followed his capricious guide out of the town, into a shadowy grove to "an edifice, which seated on a gentle eminence, and embowered amidst surrounding trees, bore the appearance of a country villa."

"The appearance of this spacious habitation was anything but inviting; it seemed to have been built with a jealous eye to concealment; and its few, but well-defended windows were sufficiently high from the ground, as effectually to baffle the prying curiosity of the inquisitive stranger. Not a single light shone from the narrow casement; but all was harsh, gloomy and forbidding. As my imagination, ever alert on such an occasion, was busily occupied in assigning some fearful motive for such unusual precautions, my leader suddenly halted beneath a lofty window, and making a low call, I perceived slowly descending there from, a thick silken cord, attached to an ample basket, which was silently deposited at our feet. Amazed at this apparition, I was about soliciting an explanation: when laying her fingers impressively upon her lips, and placing herself in the basket, my guide motioned me to seat myself beside her. I obeyed; but not without considerable trepidation and in obedience to the same low call which had procured its descent, our curious vehicle, with sundry creakings, rose in air."

This airy jaunt terminated, of course, in an abian Nights exterior, which Melville particularises after the "voluptuous" traditions of Vathek and Lalla Rookh. "The grandeur of the room," of course, "served only to show to advantage the matchless beauty of its inmate." This matchless beauty was, after established tradition, "reclining on an ottoman; in one

hand holding a lute." Her fingers, too, "were decorated with a variety of rings, which as she waved her hand to me as, I entered, darted forth a thousand coruscations, and gleamed their brilliant splendours to the sight."

"As I entered the apartment, her eyes were downcast, and the expression of her face was mournfully interesting; she had apparently been lost in some melancholy revery. Upon my entrance, however, her countenance brightened, as with a queenly wave of the hand, she motioned my conductress from the room, and left me standing, mute, admiring and bewildered in her presence."

"For a moment my brain spun round, and I had not at command a single of my faculties. Recovering my self-possession, however, and with that, my good-breeding, I advanced en cavalier and, gracefully sinking on one knee, I bowed my head and exclaimed-'Here do I prostrate myself, thou sweet Divinity, and kneel at the shrine of thy-"

But here, just at the climax of the quest, the clipping is abruptly torn, and the reader is left cruelly suspended.

From the publication of Lalla Rookh, in 1817, to the publication of Thackeray's Our Street in 1847, there settled upon letters and life in England an epidemic of hankering for the exotic. At the instigation of Lalla Rookh, England made a prim effort to be "purely and intensely Asiatic," and this while delicately avoiding "the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of Asia." In the fashionable literature of the period, the harem and the slave-market unburdened its gazelles and its interior decorations, and by a resort to divans and coruscating rubies, and ottar of roses, and lutes, and warm panting maidens, the "principled goodness" of Anglo-Saxon self-righteousness was thrilled to a discreet voluptuousness.

In his second Fragment, Melville has caught at some of the drift-wood of this great tidal wave that was washed across the Atlantic. And in acknowledgment of this early indebtedness, he in Pierre speaks of Tom Moore with an especial burst of enthusiasm, mating him with Hafiz, Anacreon, Catullus and Ovid.

Reared in a New England environment that had been so