Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale-ship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.

This is Herman Melville at his most familiar, making your blood creep, and here he is at his favourite task of interpreting the combination of bigness and delicacy which go to the making of our hunted brother whale. He is describing the battering-ram qualities of his head :

Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is-by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the sperm whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eyebrow. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincial then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's veil at Lais?

After his first two South Sea romances the "transcendentalist in oilskin" peeps through all Melville's prose. Such "highbrow" passages as that just quoted abound in Moby Dick, but the genius behind them like the potency everywhere lurking in the expansive whale gives them strength and charm. Emersonian Boston has got him by the heel-but not yet thrown him. In

Typee and Omoo the style is simpler and more lyrical. The famous description of the delightful Fayaway is a good example :

Her free pliant figure was the very perfection of female grace and beauty. Her complexion was a rich mantling olive, and when watching the glow upon her cheeks I could almost swear that beneath the transparent medium there lurked the blushes of a faint vermilion. The face of this girl was a rounded oval, and each feature was as perfectly formed as the heart or imagination of man could desire. Her full lips, when parted with a smile, disclosed teeth of a dazzling whiteness; and when her rosy mouth opened with a burst of merriment, they looked like the milk-white seeds of the "arta," a fruit of the valley, which, when cleft in twain, shows them reclining in rows on either side, embedded in the red and juicy pulp. Her hair of the deepest brown, parted irregularly in the middle, flowed in natural ringlets over her shoulders, and whenever she chanced to stoop, fell over and hid from view her lovely bosom. Gazing into the depths of her strange blue eyes, when she was in a contemplative mood, they seemed most placid and yet unfathomable, but when illuminated by some lively emotion, they beamed upon the beholder like stars. The hands of Fayaway were as soft and delicate as those of any countess; for an entire exemption from rude labour marks the girlhood and even prime of a Typee woman's life. Her feet, though wholly exposed, were as diminutive and fairly shaped as those which peep from beneath the feet of a Lima lady's dress. The skin of this young creature, from continual ablutions and the use of mollifying ointments, was inconceivably soft.

It is perhaps not strange that interest in such a writer has been revived in our time when the vigorous energies of life, which he described, as well as the smoother barbarities, are becoming mere memories in the all-conquering march of a mechanical and scientific civilisation.

Dead Letters

(T. L. H.)

By EDMUND BLunden

There lay the letters of a hundred friends

Of one whose name and years-what else?—we knew; Unordered, faded, past and gone,

Mere script that chance had let live on.

Now through this chaos of sad nothing-worth,
Of unknown moods and matters dead so long,
We'll look, we said, for any trace

Of those his friends whom years but grace:

And hurrying over pages thick as leaves
In Vallombrosa, now with sudden bush
We met with Mary Shelley's name,
Tumultuous for her dead Love's fame.

Nor without trembling could we lay our hand
To that remorseless parchment which recalled
Poor Harriet staring on the cold
Oblivious water, deathly bold.

How often, fine as this his silvered hair,
Appeared the charactery of Shelley's friend,
That friend to whom the Ariel gay
Was fleeting on the fatal day !

The face of Keats glowed out awhile, and Lamb
Seemed never far, the darling of our race;
And here the tired heroic soul

Of Landor lit the homely scroll;

And later names which England's genius bore,
Writ by the men, flashed out on our survey;
And Muse and State we chose in pride
From the great throng we cast aside.

We cast aside! poor relics, chill and dumb,
That told us nothing, seemed the chaff that time
With his great tempest might have hurled,
And no whit lost, from this wide world.

But scanning here more closely, at the last
We found our thoughts in these unknowns drawn down
To comprehend the hopes and fears,

The wrongs and harms that loosed these tears,

The half-starved fingers at their drudgeries,
The brain in fever and endeavouring still,

The unechoed songs in beauty's praise,
The affection urged in darkest days ;—

And more and more these nameless annals clutched The basty hand, the heart, till a hundred ghosts Of men unlauded, past and gone

Seemed friends that we had always known.

DECORATION FOR "THE GOOD-HUMOURED LADIES "
By Ethelbert White

THE BEAUMONT PRESS

THEN Mr. C. W. Beaumont issued a limited edition of
Mr. John Drinkwater's Tides, in 1917, many were of the

W

opinion that so laborious a process of book production could not last. But that opinion has been negatived. The books of the Beaumont Press have continued to appear regularly, though infrequently, during the past five years, until to-day the bibliography of the press extends to some fifteen volumes, all of which are in character, but each of them unique. This achievement is of no little importance in an age of increasing standardisation, when excessive uniformity threatens to conquer the last strongholds of diversity in ideas and crafts; and the completion of the first five years of the press invites a consideration of the work which has been accomplished. It is appropriate that such an appraisal should appear in To-DAY, for it was in these pages that the first review of a Beaumont Press book appeared.