¹ In those stories with a first-person speaker who is himself a main character—here “Bartleby” is the best example—this effort merges with the character’s dramatic struggle, sometimes comically reluctant, to act out the part that has fallen to him in the story. It may thus issue in a kind of surprising conversion, an unsought-for transformation of consciousness and commitment.

² One may say, risking misunderstanding, that the conspiracy of fiction is thus, ideally, a religious conspiracy: i.e., a ritual enterprise for the binding together of minds and souls in space (otherwise divided and uncivil) and in time (otherwise fractured and unhistorical).

³ The principal work, however, of this long interval, which was devoted mostly to writing poetry, is a kind of philosophical novel-in-verse, Clarel (2v., 1876), offering a remarkable new gallery of fictional characterizations.

* The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.

* The American Spaniards have long been in the habit of making presents of islands to deserving individuals. The pilot Juan Fernandez procured a deed of the isle named after him, and for some years resided there before Selkirk came. It is supposed, however, that he eventually contracted the blues upon his princely property, for after a time he returned to the main, and as report goes, became a very garrulous barber in the city of Lima.