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Nathaniel Hawthorne.
    At forty-six, Hawthorne was fifteen years Melville’s senior. He’d recently completed The Scarlet Letter and was now working on The House of the Seven Gables in a rented farmhouse in nearby Lenox, where he lived with his wife, Sophia, and their two children, Julian and Una. During a picnic atop Monument Mountain, the two writers had a chance to talk for the first time. Soon after, Melville read Hawthorne’s story collection Mosses from an Old Manse . A week later, Melville gave Duyckinck the essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” for publication in the Literary World .
    At that time, Hawthorne enjoyed a reputation as a mild-mannered recluse penning well-crafted stories about New England’s quaint colonial past. This, Melville insisted, was missing the point. Instead of a “harmless” stylist, Hawthorne was an unappreciated genius possessed by “this great power of blackness.” Hidden beneath his stories’ lapidarian surfaces were truths so profound and disturbing that they ranked with anything written in the English language.
    Melville then turned his attention in the review to Shakespeare. “[I]t is those deep far-away things in him,” Melville declared, “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality;—these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.” Moreover, it was through his “dark characters,” such as Hamlet, Lear, and Iago, that Shakespeare “craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them!” In writing about Hawthorne, Melville, via Shakespeare, was laying the groundwork for Ahab.
    During the fall of 1850, Melville and Hawthorne got to know each other. Temperamentally, the two men could not have been more different. Melville, Sophia Hawthorne wrote, was a “man . . . with life to his finger-tips.” Hawthorne, on the other hand, preferred to keep life at a distance. In fact, Sophia confessed in a letter to her mother that prior to meeting Melville on Monument Mountain, her “shy dear” of a husband had specifically requested not to be introduced to the young and enthusiastic writer. Even in friendship, Hawthorne remained remote and detached while Melville was always crowding in. “Nothing pleases me better,” Sophia wrote of their new literary friend, “than to sit & hear this growing man dash his tumultuous waves of thought up against Mr. Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences.”
    But Melville was not all ardent impetuosity in his conversations with Hawthorne; there was, as Sophia observed, a somewhat unsettling method to his madness. In a letter to her mother, Sophia revealed that the one thing she didn’t like about Melville was his “small eyes.” “Once in a while,” she explained, “his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of those eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.” This is Melville caught in the act of creative infiltration—the sneaky, deceptively “lazy” way that he took what he needed from Hawthorne. Instead of a literary influence, Hawthorne was, for Melville, more of a source of emotional inspiration: the figure that moved him to take Shakespeare’s lead and dive into the darkness. Just as Ahab co-opted the Pequod, Melville used Hawthorne’s fiction only as it served his own literary purposes.
    But what about Hawthorne the man? Where did the power of darkness come from? Melville was at a loss.