thirty-two-year-old Herman Melville wrote a letter to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne about this wave of romantic giddiness. Melville appreciated the delicious, seductive power of their peers’ transcendental ecstasies, but he also understood them to be on a slippery slope toward a very American solipsism. “ ‘Live in the all,’ ” Melville wrote to Hawthorne. What nonsense!… This “all” feeling…there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all
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