"We are, perhaps, after a century of literary wastelands, able to read not only a personal predicament but a general truth in Melville's blasted islands, bedevilled slave ships, misshapen houses, falling towers, ticking tables, ghastly factories, sickly cottages, and blank brick city walls. The appetite for truth is what gives Melville's narratives their persistent interest and, even under the spell of discouragement, their untoward verbal energy ... Like Billy Budd, Melville when a sailor on a man-of-war was a top-man, at home on the highest yards, enjoying the widest view ... Melville instinctively aspired to the grandest scale, and even in his shorter works offers vast inklings and the resonance of cosmic concerns.