It is easy to see why Melville, himself a prey to the deepest forebodings about the optimism of his day, recognized at once his kinship of spirit with Hawthorne. "There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion (he wrote), was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne." A year after Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, Melville dedicated his own most powerful embodiment of this tragic phase, Moby Dick, to Hawthorne, his acknowledged master. Together the two books are witness to the vitality of the tragic vision, which pierces beneath the "official view" of any culture to the dark realities that can never be permanently hidden, and together they mark a recrude