"A man with true, warm heart, and a soul and an intellect, — with life to his fingerprints; earnest, sincere, and reverent; very tender and modest. And I am not sure that he is not a very great man. He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to me to see everything accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with an air free, brave, and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace or polish. Once in a while, his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of those eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself."
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesHumanistsPeople from New York CityPhilosophical pessimists
Original Language: English
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Sources
Sophia Hawthorne, in a letter to her mother (1850), as quoted in Herman Melville : Mariner and Mystic (1921) by Raymond Melbourne Weaver, p. 24
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herman_Melville
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Herman Melville
1819 – 1891
US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller, Dichter und Essayist
118 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Herman Melville →
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