your most extended view in any one direction, at least, is in a high slow-rolling sea; when you descend into the dark misty spaces, between long and uniform swells. Then, for the moment, it is like looking up and down in a twilight glade, interminable; where two dawns, one on each hand, seem struggling through the semi-transparent tops of the fluid mountains."

Of his first lowering in pursuit of a whale, he says in MobyDick: "It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that seemed almost threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side:-all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, and wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;-all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world,-neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time. finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale."

After this first lowering, Melville returned to the ship to indulge in the popular nautical diversion of making his will. This ceremony concluded, he says he looked round him "tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault. Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost."

In Moby-Dick, whales are sighted, chased, and captured; nor does Melville fail to give detailed accounts of these activities or of the ensuing "cutting in" and the "trying" of the oil.

One of the most vivid scenes in Moby-Dick is the description of the "try-works" in operation.

"By midnight," says Melville, "the works were in full operation. We were clean from the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooners, always the whaleship's stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a seasofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; their uncivilised laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace: to and fro, in their front, the harpooners wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night; and scornfully champed, ar! viciously spat round her on all sides." During this scene Melville stood at the helm, "and for long silent hours guarded the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire

these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm."

In a chapter on dreams, in Mardi, one of the wildest chapters Melville ever wrote, and the one in which he profoundly searched into the heart of his mystery, he compares his dreams to a vast herd of buffaloes, "browsing on to the horizon, and browsing on round the world; and among them, I dash with my lance, to spear one, ere they all flee." In this world of dreams, "passing and repassing, like Oriental empires in history," Melville discerned, "far in the background, hazy and blue, their steeps let down from the sky, Andes on Andes, rooted on Alps; and all round me, long rolling oceans, roll Amazons and Orinocos; waver, mounted Parthians; and to and fro, toss the wide woodlands: all the world an elk, and the forest its antlers. Beneath me, at the equator, the earth pulses and beats like a warrior's heart, till I know not whether it be not myself. And my soul sinks down to the depths, and soars to the skies; and comet-like reels on through such boundless expanses, that methinks all the worlds are my kin, and I invoke them to stay in their course. Yet, like a mighty three decker, towing argosies by scores, I tremble, gasp, and strain in my flight, and fain would cast off the cables that hamper."

On that night that Melville drowsed at the helm of the Acushnet while she was "freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of blackness" his soul sank deep into itself, and he seems to have awakened to recognise in the ship that he drowsily steered, the material counterpart of the darkest mysteries of his own soul. It was then that he awoke to be "horribly conscious" that "whatever swift rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern." And in reflecting upon that insight Melville plunges into the lowest abyss of disenchantment. "The truest of men was the Man of Sorrows," he says, "and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of All is vanity. ALL. . . He who . . . calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and

woe.

throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon."

The greatest of all dreamers conquer their dreams; others, who are great, but not of the greatest, are mastered by them, and Melville was one of these. There is a passage in the works of Edgar Allan Poe that Melville may well have pondered when he awoke at the helm of the Acushnet after looking too long into the glare of the fire: "There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man is no Carathes to explore with impunity its every cavern. All the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful; but, like the demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep or they will devour us-they must be suffered to slumber or we perish."

CHAPTER VIII

LEVIATHAN

"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, fatally encumbered by their armour. Whereupon the rascally burglarious peasants, their foes, fell to picking their visors; as burglars, locks; as oystermen oysters; to get at their lives. But all to no purpose. And at last they were fain to ask aid of a blacksmith; and not till then were the inmates of the armour despatched. Days of chivalry these, when gallant chevaliers died chivalric deaths! Yes, they were glorious times. But no sensible man, given to quiet domestic delights, would exchange his warm fireside and muffins, for a heroic bivouac, in a wild beechen wood, of a raw gusty morning in Normandy; every knight blowing his steel-gloved fingers, and vainly striving to cool his cold coffee in his helmet."

HERMAN MELVILLE: Mardi.

It was the same Edmund Burke who movingly mourned the departure of the epic virtues of chivalry, who in swift generalities celebrated the heroic enterprise of the hunters of leviathan. But Burke viewed both whaling and knight-errantry from a safe remove of time or place, and the crude everyday realities of each he smothered beneath billows of gorgeous generalisation. Burke offers a notable instance wherein romance and rhetoric conspired to glorify two human activities that are glorious only in expurgation. Piracy is picturesque in its extinction, and to the snugly domesticated imagination there is both virtue and charm in cut-throats and highwaymen. Even the perennial newspaper accounts of massacre and rape doubtless serve to keep sweet the blood of many a benevolent pew-holder. The incorrigible tendency of the imagination to extract sweet from the bitter, honey from the carcass of the lion, makes an intimate consideration of the filthy soil from which some of its choicest illusions spring, downright repugnant to wholesomemindedness. Intimately considered, both whaling and knight-errantry were shabby forms of the butchering business. Their virtues were but the nobler vices of barbarism: vices that take on a semblance of nobility only