terceded with Neptune, and the sea-gods strove to answer Melville's prayer. But Melville always, even in the lowest abyss of despair, clung passionately to life. And the night he was hurled from the mast he was hurled from among friends, and into waters that washed the neighbouring shores of his birth.

Melville's long wanderings were nearly at an end. With the home port believed to be broad on their bow, under the stars and a meagre moon in her last quarter, the main-top-men gathered aloft in the top, and round the mast they circled, "hand in hand, all spliced together. We had reefed the last top-sail; trained the last gun; blown the last match; bowed to the last blast; been tranced in the last calm. We had mustered our last round the capstan; been rolled to grog the last time; for the last time swung in our hammocks; for the last time turned out at the sea-gull call of the watch. We had seen our last man scourged at the gangway; our last man gasp out the ghost in the stifling sick-bay; our last man tossed to the sharks."

And there Melville has left this brother band-with the anchor still hanging from the bow-with the land still out of sight. "I love an indefinite infinite background," he says,“a vast, heaving, rolling, mysterious rear!"

CHAPTER XIII

INTO THE RACING TIDE

"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 peril."-HERMAN MELVILLE: Pierre.

"UNTIL I was twenty-five," Melville once wrote to Hawthorne, "I had no development at all." When the cable and anchor of the United States were all clear, and when he bounded ashore on his native soil, Melville was in his twentyfifth year. "From my twenty-fifth year," he wrote Hawthorne, "I date my life."

His three years of wandering, crowded as they were with alienating experiences, had, of course, worked deep changes in him: changes more radical than in the dizzy whirl of strangely peopled adventures it was possible for him to gauge. In memory, the fitful fever of the past, deceitfully seems to strive not. But we delude ourselves when we fancy that it sleeps well. During his far driftings, Melville had clung reverently to thoughts of home, his imagination treacherously caressing those very scenes whose intimate contact had filled him with revulsion. "Do men ever hate the thing they love?" he asks in White-Jacket, perplexed at the paradox of this perpetual recoil. He was eternally looking both before and after, but never with the smug and genial after-dinner optimism of Rabbi Ben Ezra. The insufficient present was always poisoned, to him, by bitter margins of pining and regret. In headlong escape from his household gods he had been landed among South Sea islands that in retrospect he viewed as "authentic Edens." Yet even in Paradise did he feel himself an exile, teaching old Marheyo to say "Home" and "Mother," converting into sacred words the countersigns of a former Hell. He tells in White-Jacket, how, with the smell of tar in his nostrils, out of sight of land, with a stout ship under his

feet, and snuffing the ocean air, in the silence and solitude of the deep, during the long night watches used to come thronging about his heart "holy home associations." And he closes White-Jacket with the reflection that "Life's a voyage that's homeward-bound!" But he sailed with sealed orders.

Of Melville's impressions upon his return he has left no record. During his three years of whaling and captivity among cannibals, and mutiny, and South Sea driftings, and adventures in the Navy, life at home had gone along in its regular necessary way; and the scenes of his youth, despite their transformation in his memory, lived on in solid fact unchanged. The identical trees in the Boston Common blotted out the same patterns against the New England stars; none of the streets had swerved from off their prim and angular respectability. His mother he found living in Lansingburg, just out from Albany, N. Y. There was the same starched calico smell to his sister's dresses, the same clang-tint to his mother's voice. Such was the calibre of his imagination, that he must have found life at Lansingburg unbelievably like he knew it must be, yet very different from what he was prepared to find.

His brothers must have first appeared intimate strangers to him. His elder brother, Gansevoort, had given up his hat and fur shop, was well established in law and had won a creditable name for himself in politics. His younger brother, Allan, was beginning a successful legal career, with his name emblazoned on a door at 10 Wall Street. Maria was, after all, a Gansevoort; she was not too proud to keep her brothers reminded that she had borne sons. Melville's youngest brother, Tom, had sprung from boyhood into the self-conscious maturity of youth.

From vagabondage in Polynesia to the stern yoke of selfsupporting citizenship was a dizzy transition. But Melville did not clear it at a bound. The very violence of the impact between the two antipodal types of experience for a time must have stunned Melville to their incompatibility. Tanned with sea-faring, exuberant in health, rosy with the after-glow of his proud companionship with Jack Chase, and the respect

and affection he had won from his associates on board the United States, he was effulgent with amazing tales-the enviable hero of endless incredible adventures. His home-coming may well have been not only a staggering, but a joyous adventure. For he entered Lansingburg trailing clouds of glory. He was panoplied in romance; and though bodily he was in a suburb of Albany, his companion image was the distant adventurer he saw mirrored in the admiring and jealous imagination of his friends. With what melancholy-if any-he viewed this reflected image, and to what degree he was, Narcissus-wise, conscious of its irony, we do not know. But if Typee and Omoo be any index of his mood, he returned home happier and wholesomer than at any other period of his life. Before many years, unsolved problems of his youth were to reassert themselves, heightened in difficulty and in pertinacity. Yet for a time, at least, so it would appear, he reaped very substantial benefits from his escape beyond civilisation.

According to J. E. A. Smith, Melville was soon beset by his enthralled and wide-eyed friends to put his experiences into a book. Even if such a challenge had never been made, it is difficult to see how Melville could have escaped plunging into literature. For the hankering for letters had earlier stirred in Melville's blood,-a hankering that he had before succumbed to, swathing a vacuity of experience in the grave-wrappings of rhetoric and prolixity. Now he was rich in matter; because of the very straitened circumstances of his family, he was faced again by the necessity of earning some money if he stayed at home; and in so far as we know, he was untempted to venture forth either as vagabond or efficiency expert.

Soon after his arrival home he must have settled down to composition. For the manuscript of Typee was bought in London by John Murray, by an agreement dated December, 1845.

At the time of the completion of Typee, Melville's brother, Gansevoort, was starting for London as Secretary to the American Legation under Minister McLane. Gansevoort threw Typee in among his luggage, to try its luck

among Brit

ish publishers. Whether Typce had previously been refused in the United States has not yet transpired. In any event, John Murray bought the English rights to print a thousand copies of Typee-a purchase that cost him £100. Murray did not close the sale, however, until he was assured that Typee was a sober account of actual experiences. Typce appeared in two parts in Murray's "Colonial and Home Library." Part I appeared on February 26, 1846; Part II on April 1 of the

same year.

Encouraged by the temerity of John Murray, Wiley and Putnam of New York bought the American rights for Typec. And by an agreement made in England, Typee appeared simultaneously in New York and London: in America under the title, Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life During Four Months' Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas. In 1849, Harper Brothers took over Typee, and issued it shorn of some of the passages the Missionaries had found most objectionable. Up to January 1, 1849, Wiley and Putnam had sold 6,392 copies of Typee: a sale upon which Melville gained $655.91. Up to April 29, 1851, 7,437 copies of Typee had been sold in England, netting Melville, if accounts surviving in Allan's hand be correct, $708.40.

Under the date of April 3, 1846-two days after the appearance in England of Part II of Typee, Gansevoort wrote Melville the following letter-the last letter, it appears, he ever

wrote:

"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 and myself. As the correspondence speaks for itself, it is quite unnecessary to add any comment. By the steamer of to-morrow I send to your address several newspaper comments and critiques of your book. The one in the Sun was written. by a gentleman who is very friendly to myself, and who may possibly for that reason have made it unusually eulogistic.