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How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.

Herman Melville

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Herman Melville
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: August 1
Died: 1891
Died: September 28
Art Collector
Essayist
Lecturer
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Sailor
Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Hermann Melville
Herman Melvill
Heart
Cells
Masons
Punishment
Inflict
Solitude
Horrors
Prison
Prisons
Horror
Feeble
Population
Condemn
Upon
Perpetual
Wretches
Language
Describe
Mason

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Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.
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Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.
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I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
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...The silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.
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There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.
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There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.
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Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.
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For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who believe and tremble has one.
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Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.
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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
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beauty is like piety--you cannot run and read it tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.
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We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.
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Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale... from hell's heart I stab at thee.
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But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.
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Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
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It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.
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Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
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I would prefer not to.
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Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?
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There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered be a cause not partisan.
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