The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.” Perhaps the most vigorous and passionate Arcadian in American literature is Herman Melville, mariner and mystic. Descended from Dutch and New England parents proud and conservative, Melville was driven to “the water world,” he tells us, by “sad disappointments ... united with a naturally roving disposition.” He deserted his ship and found in the valley of the Typees “perpetual hilarity. Surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature,” the innocent natives enjoy the idyllic bliss “that springs principally from that all-pervading sensation which Rousseau told us he at one time experienced: the mere buoyant sense of healthful, physical existence.” This was before the missionaries and “the worst attendances of civilisation” drove “all peace and happiness from the valley.” In _Mardi_, frankly idyllic and nympholeptic, devoted to the savages “as they are not,” Melville’s nostalgic idealism and his hatred of reality become intensified. Here he creates a dream-girl, Yillah, “the earthly semblance of that sweet vision, that haunted my earliest thought,” and the book is a record of the allegorical quest for her through all the nations of the earth. It follows Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, with their hope for the infinite perfectibility of men; it is the quest of _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_, the quest of Novalis for the Blue Flower. “But fiery yearnings their own phantom-future make, and deem it present. So, if after all these fearful, fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;--yet, in bold quest thereof better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.” If Melville fled, however, “not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern”--such as the “Babylonish brick-kiln of New York,” “Commonness and Conventionalism,” “mines and marts,” and Democracy, “the harlot on horseback”--his first-hand experience with the reality of a sea red in tooth and claw as well as “the mystery of iniquity” tended to clash with his dreams of Utopia. _Moby-Dick_ was born of this clash between the hope of a paradise of supernal beauty and the sight of a malignant reality from the deck of a whaler. We have his own commentary on the final results of nympholeptic longing: “Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot.... The truest of men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and the Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men.... And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from great woes--no more.... Sadness makes the silence throughout the realms of space; Sadness is universal and eternal.”