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- intrusted to Gansevoort for submission to John Murray. Its immediate
acceptance and publication followed in 1846. ‘Typee’ was dedicated to
Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, an old friendship between
the author’s family and that of Justice Shaw having been renewed about
this time. Mr. Melville became engaged to Miss Elizabeth Shaw, the only
daughter of the Chief Justice, and their marriage followed on August 4,
1847, in Boston.
The wanderings of our nautical Othello were thus brought to a
conclusion. Mr. and Mrs. Melville resided in New York City until 1850,
when they purchased a farmhouse at Pittsfield, their farm adjoining that
formerly owned by Mr. Melville’s uncle, which had been inherited by the
latter’s son. The new place was named ‘Arrow Head,’ from the numerous
Indian antiquities found in the neighbourhood. The house was so situated
as to command an uninterrupted view of Greylock Mountain and the
adjacent hills. Here Melville remained for thirteen years, occupied
with his writing, and managing his farm. An article in Putnam’s Monthly
entitled ‘I and My Chimney,’ another called ‘October Mountain,’ and the
introduction to the ‘Piazza Tales,’ present faithful pictures of Arrow
Head and its surroundings. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, given
in ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife,’ his daily life is set forth. The
letter is dated June 1, 1851.
‘Since you have been here I have been building some shanties of houses
(connected with the old one), and likewise some shanties of chapters and
essays. I have been ploughing and sowing and raising and printing and
praying, and now begin to come out upon a less bristling time, and to
enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the
old farmhouse here. Not entirely yet, though, am I without something to
be urgent with. The ‘Whale’ is only half through the press; for, wearied
with the long delays of the printers, and disgusted with the heat
and dust of the Babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to the
country to feel the grass, and end the book reclining on it, if I may.’
Mr. Hawthorne, who was then living in the red cottage at Lenox, had
a week at Arrow Head with his daughter Una the previous spring. It is
recorded that the friends ‘spent most of the time in the barn, bathing
in the early spring sunshine, which streamed through the open doors,
and talking philosophy.’ According to Mr. J. E. A. Smith’s volume on the
Berkshire Hills, these gentlemen, both reserved in nature, though near
neighbours and often in the same company, were inclined to be shy of
each other, partly, perhaps, through the knowledge that Melville had
written a very appreciative review of ‘Mosses from an Old Manse’ for the
New York Literary World, edited by their mutual friends, the Duyckincks.
‘But one day,’ writes Mr. Smith, ‘it chanced that when they were out on
a picnic excursion, the two were compelled by a thundershower to take
shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks of Monument Mountain. Two hours
of this enforced intercourse settled the matter. They learned so much
of each other’s character,... that the most intimate friendship for
the future was inevitable.’ A passage in Hawthorne’s ‘Wonder Book’
is noteworthy as describing the number of literary neighbours in
Berkshire:--
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