“‘Eh! He’s asleep, ain’t he?’
“‘With kings and counsellors,’ murmured I.”
—Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener.
“The death of Herman Melville,” wrote Arthur Stedman, “came as a surprise to the public at large, chiefly because it revealed the fact that such a man had lived so long.” The New York Times missed the news of Melville’s death (on September 28, 1891) and published a few days later an editorial beginning:
“There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigour of life, that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was of but three or four lines.”
In 1885, Robert Buchanan published in the London Academy a pasquinade containing the following lines:
“... Melville, sea-compelling man,
Before whose wand Leviathan
Rose hoary white upon the Deep,
With awful sounds that stirred its sleep;