SNOW, AND QUALITY OF WHITENESS 109 



ing its shores, but after the ship had struck on 

 the hidden rocks, was the effect of whiteness as 

 seen in a tumultuous milky sea; and now, after 

 several months there came this snow-fall, and a 

 vaster and stranger whiteness. My uppermost 

 feeling at the time was one of delight at seeing 

 what I had been hoping for months to see, but had 

 now, when winter was so nearly over, ceased to 

 hope for. This pleasure was purely intellectual; 

 but when I ask myself if there was anything be- 

 sides, a deeper, undefinable feeling, I can only 

 answer, I think not : my first experience of snow 

 does not lead me to believe that there is any 

 instinctive feeling in us related to it; that the 

 feeling which so many, perhaps a majority of per- 

 sons, experience on seeing the earth whitened by 

 the breath of winter, must be accounted for in 

 some other way. 



In Herman Melville's romance of Moby Dick, 

 or The Whale, there is a long dissertation, per- 

 haps the finest thing in the book, on whiteness in 

 nature, and its effect on the mind. It is an inter- 

 esting and somewhat obscure subject; and, as 

 Melville is the only writer I know who has dealt 

 with it, and something remains to be said, I may 

 look to be pardoned for dwelling on it at some 

 length in this place. 



Melville recalls the fact that in numberless nat- 

 ural objects whiteness enhances beauty, as if it 

 imparted some special virtue of its own, as in 

 marbles, japonicas, pearls; that the quality of 



