hard not to be amused at this injunction to spare one for whom the future held so much green and bitter fruit and whose genius blazed in so sudden a heat; and it is hard not to be amused also at the depreciation of Herman's wits, when we reflect how quickly this backward child ripened and published the singular Mardi at thirty, the transcendent Moby-Dick at thirtytwo, and the disquieting, significant Pierre at thirtythree-young indeed for the writing of prose masterpieces. And docile and amiable? In later chapters we shall see ample and acute reasons for doubting the docility, and wondering by what suppressions the character of amiable was sustained.

Herman seems to have spent other summer holidays at his uncle's, in Albany, but his school life nevertheless went on normally. "We expect Gansevoort on Sunday, at fartherest," his father wrote, "when we wish Herman also to be here, that they may recommence their studies together on Monday next, with equal chances of preferment. . . . If they understand early that inclination must always yield to Duty, it will become a matter of course when their vacations expire to bid a fond adieu to friends and amusements, and return home cheerfully to their books, and they will consequently imbibe habits of order and punctuality." The moral astringency is as powerful as in the case of that later American writer of unsuspected genius, Emily Dickinson; only, in her case, there was an added sharpness of evangelical tyranny which, continuing long after her escape from girlhood, turned the fine edge of her spirit. This tyranny Herman Melville escaped.

When he was little more than eight years old the

family moved again, but the removal this time did not signify increasing prosperity. After two years his father's affairs became so dismal that he removed once more to Albany, and died after another two years, leaving his wife and the eight surviving children sadly impoverished. Herman was thirteen years of age, and remembered enough of the family vicissitudes to be able to record them in Redburn, His First Voyage, being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman in the Merchant Service. It is a sufficiently explicit title, and the references to his own early years are likewise explicit. He speaks of the days, those delightful days, before his father failed after many adversities and died, and the opening pages are suffused with that tenderest mellow flush which memory and time unite, by a familiar chemistry, to pour upon the obscurities of the past. The literature of remembered childhood, which is the chief part of the literature of childhood, had a strong attraction for Melville, and he employs all his skill in composing a narrative of singular simplicity, relating childish things directly and freshly out of a love which points to happiness in the past and longing in the present. For Wellingborough Redburn is Herman Melville, especially when he writes of his father and his home. "Of winter evenings in New York, by the wellremembered sea-coal fire in old Greenwich-street, he used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountains high; of the masts bending like twigs; and all about Havre, and Liverpool, and about going up into the ball of St. Paul's in London. Indeed, during my early life, most of my thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine

old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and long, narrow, crooked streets without side-walks, and lined with strange houses. And especially I tried hard to think how such places must look of rainy days and Saturday afternoons; and whether indeed they did have rainy days and Saturdays there, just as we did here; and whether the boys went to school there, and studied geography, and wore their shirt collars turned over, and tied with a black ribbon; and whether their papas allowed them to wear boots, instead of shoes, which I so much disliked, for boots looked so manly." Under this spell of romance, cast by the admired voice of one who had travelled so far, his own thoughts, he says, went travelling yet farther, until, imagination kindling, he saw himself returning over those monstrous waves and reciting the wonders of barbarous countries, himself arrayed like a foreign prince to startle the eyes of all beholders:-"see what big eyes he has," his aunt whispered. He used to examine the furniture brought by his father from foreign parts, paintings, engravings, and what not, prying into them as if to force their romance from them: sea-paintings, French coloured prints, pictures of natural history, books in abundance, and on the title-page of many that mysterious word of Arabian potency, that strange key-name, London. More than all these in the childish eyes was "an oldfashioned glass ship, about eighteen inches long, and of French manufacture, which my father, some thirty years before, had brought home from Hamburg as a present to a great-uncle of mine: Senator Wellingborough, who had died a member of Congress in the days of the old Constitution, and after whom I had the

honour of being named". It was, as already noted, from his mother's brother, General Herman Gansevoort, that Melville received his Christian name. In Redburn, Melville recaptures the primal joy when he recalls this little glass ship, with its ingenious crystal elaboration of masts and rigging and coloured figures running to and fro, yet never moving, "as I can take my oath"; and recollections such as these relate him to the millions of normal children who of all their sorrows remember little, and of all their joys retain undyingly the keenest. Melville was a normal healthy child living a normal commonplace life. At home his affections, as we have just seen, were centred upon familiar, simple things; at school, at the Albany Academy, he applied his slowness of comprehension so moderately that no record has been made of his progress from his entrance in 1830, when he joined his brother Gansevoort there; and when in 1862 his uncle, Peter Gansevoort, as Trustee, presided over an anniversary celebration, and Herman himself was welcomed as an author who had extended the honour of the Academy world-wide, there was apparently still no assertion of his precocity as a scholar; no wiseacre wagged his beard and pretended, "I told you so".

He was not long at the Albany Academy, for the death of his father and the subsequent poverty of his family drove him into the world, and in 1834 he entered the service of the New York State Bank, of which his Uncle Peter was a Trustee; and 1835 found him acting as clerk in his brother's shop. A biographical sketch of 1891 records that during that year Melville was a pupil of the Albany Classical Institute-a favourite pupil, not at all distinguished except in writing themes

and compositions; while in 1836 he was to be found in the household of his father's brother, Major Thomas Melville, at Pittsfield, actively assisting on the farm. His uncle was "grey-haired, but not wrinkled. . . . His manners were mild and kindly, with a faded brocade of old French breeding, which-contrasted with his surroundings at the time-impressed me as not a little interesting, not wholly without a touch of pathos.

"He never used the scythe, but I frequently raked with him in the hay-field... By the late October fire, in the great hearth of the capacious kitchen of the old farm mansion, I remember to have seen him frequently sitting just before early bedtime, gazing into the embers, while his face plainly expressed to a sympathetic observer that his heart, thawed to the core under the influence of the general flame, carried him far away over the ocean to the gay boulevards. . It was the French graft upon the New England stock, which produced the autumnal apple: perhaps the mellower for the frost." The hand of the romantic artist appears in Melville's picture of his twin-natured uncle, and the touch of gallantry conferred upon him by nature or the painter, but the picture itself is an affectionate one. Thomas Melville died soon after Herman's voyages ended, and this record conveys a final impression of one whose image was clearly cherished with admiration and sympathy.

It may have been before he fled to sea-for flight his first voyage seems to us, in its unprepared suddenness as well as afterwards, that Herman took the part of school-teacher; but it could not have occupied him for long since that flight occurred in 1837. His own