literary society in nearby-
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Lenox. Sorrow at I lawthornc's leaving for eastern Massachusetts, bafflement


and anguish at the early reviews of Moby-Dick, distress over Lizzie's pro-longed illness, the persistence of wretched weather, and word of new ven- otnousncss in the local inhabitants, all shook him, cracking the charmed serenity of the Bcrkshires long before he finished Pierre at the end of the year.
Melville was, as always, starting from close to home. What he first pulled up from the recesses of his memory, as he fashioned the story of his hero's encountering a young woman who may Ik an older child of his own father, may have had something to do with an experience of his Uncle Thomas soon after the death of his brother, Herman's father, in the few months between that death and the death of Herman's grandfather, old "I*homas Mclvill, the hero of the Boston Tea Party. At that time two women, perhaps aunt and niece, had called at the family house in Green Street hoping to obtain some money from the estate of Melville's father, and had been turned away after being told that he had died deeply in debt. It was unfortunate, Melville's uncle had later observed t
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o Lemuel Shaw, that the junior of the two "had not been brought up different," especially since he thought her an interesting young person. Something about the episode ?Melville's Uncle Thomas's insistence that no one else alive knew about the visit hut his sister I Iclcn (Herman's aunt, later 1 Iclcn Souther) ?suggests that the purpose was graver than an