on the Concord; Emerson's star-like Essays began to appear; but Whitman's true work falls outside the period, while nothing at all of importance came from Lowell. Of all these not one has gained so much from Time's sifting as Melville. And if the comparison is made with English writers it is possible to speak very much to the same effect. Fashions in literary appreciation are as uncertain as other fashions, but the revaluation that is slowly completed long after an author's eclipse is seldom a mere caprice. When Melville died in 1891 no one recalled the fact that Moby-Dick came between Pendennis and Esmond, and between David Copperfield and Bleak House; that Mardi had been published within a few months of Vanity Fair, and Omoo within a few months of Wuthering Heights. As the light of a star may be many years in its passage to the earth, so Melville's work needed more than half a century to reveal its full lustre in the great age of the novel. No one will pretend that his secondary novels, such as Omoo, exceed in brightness the tragic blaze of Emily Brontë, nor that even MobyDick outshines the contemporary work of Dickens; and it is sufficient to say that Melville did supremely what no one of his age was doing at all, and that it is by virtue of difference, not by virtue of likeness, that his greatness in any contemporary company is assured. If we include in this glance those that wrote a little later, Reade and George Eliot, Kingsley, Wilkie Collins and Trollope, the solitary excellence of Herman Melville is not less conspicuous. The judgement of 1926 upon the work of, say, 1845 to 1865 is at least disinterested, and unvexed by the personal afterglow which makes prompt critical assessment so tempting

and so fallacious; and the modern restationing of two of these writers, Anthony Trollope and Herman Melville, is a blessed instance of the subtle revolution which at length redresses all inequity. Little audacity, indeed, is wanted to repeat now, in concluding, the assertion with which this volume opened, that Melville is the most powerful of all the great American writers.

It is, nevertheless, not quite easy to see his work, or himself in his work, except in an image and at a little distance. The needed image is the simplestthat of a mountain or shape of mountain-like proportions, rising from a confused plain into confused cloud; a dark irregular formation with deep forests and falling waters and chasms that seem like mere defeats of creation; facing the east an abundance of green pasture, and to the west a wild mystery of incumbent shape and shadow. At times the head is obscure, at times clear, according as you look through glasses or without them, and see the mountain simply or with perverse prepossessions. The great mass is lonely and silent, as all places of natural growth or upheaval; it is heaved out of American soil, sustained by and in turn sustaining native resources. The brightness is never delusive, for in Melville's youthful, impetuous books, such as Typee and Redburn, there is no more than there seems, and symbols have not yet seduced him; but the western shadows are strange, and the forest growth of Moby-Dick and Pierre is painful, haunted and unholy. The remote grandeur of the mountain head was once invisible, but to-day it is clear, for time has passed and questions have yielded their own answers. In 1921

-thirty years after Melville's death-Professor Raymond Weaver first surveyed the mountain, and now in 1926 the present light railway is opened, and offers a humble passage about the ravined, irregular rock.

APPENDIX

"MOCHA DICK"

THE Confirmation by Mr. Hawes in his book Whaling (1924) of Melville's extraordinary stories of whales is amplified by an anonymous article in The Detroit Free Press a few months after Melville's death.

"Between the years 1840 and 1859 the whaling vessels of such nations as pursued the leviathan of the deep for his commercial value encountered no less than five whales who became famous as terrors of the sea. They were 'Mocha Dick', 'Spotted Tom', 'Shy Jack', 'Ugly Tom', and 'Fighting Joe'. These names were of course given them by the sailors, but they came to be known to whalers of all nations. You may think it curious that one whale could be identified from another of the same size and species, but it was no more difficult than to identify one particular horse in a drove of several hundred. In other words, each leviathan has some peculiar mark or characteristic of his own, and if sighted two or three times can be identified for ever afterward.

"Mocha Dick' headed the list of terrors from the start, and kept his place for nineteen long years. No whale was so fiercely hunted, and none ever created so much damage among the hunters. What I am going to tell you is partly a matter of published record in England, Scotland and America, and was partly gleaned from Nantucket and

New Bedford whalers who battled with the cachalot time after time, to suffer defeat on each occasion.

"On the 5th day of July, 1840, the English whaling brig 'Desmond', being then 215 miles due west of the port of Valparaiso, Chili, sighted a lone whale which breached his full length above the surface about two miles away. The boats were lowered, but before they were within half a mile of the whale he slued around head on to them and advanced to meet them. He struck one boat with his head, and drove her under stern first and then chewed her up. He then sounded and was lost to sight for fifteen minutes. When he came up it was to lift the other boat thirty feet high on his head, and of course she was completely shattered. Oars and planks were ground fine by his teeth as he wallowed about, and two men were drowned before the whale finally went slowly off to the north. This Iwas 'Mocha Dick's' introduction to the blubber hunters. He was the largest whale any one aboard the brig had ever seen, and across his head was a scar about eight feet long, which showed almost white on the grey-black background. It was by this scar he was ever afterward identified.

"The next craft to encounter 'Mocha Dick' was the Russian bark 'Sarepta'. This was on the 30th of August, almost two months later, and she was fully 500 miles to the south of the spot where he was first seen. She lowered two boats for a lone whale and killed him. The bark was three miles away, and beating down to the whale under a light breeze, when 'Mocha Dick' suddenly shot out of the water between the vessel and the boats. Such was his impetus that nearly his full length could be traced before he fell with a crash that could have been heard for miles around. As soon as he had righted himself he made straight for the boats. One of them passed around the dead whale before he got up, but the other was caught by