“Sometimes the friendship reached white heat, as when, a few months later, Melville wrote in a mood of valediction, having learned that Hawthorne had given up the place in Lenox and was about to move back east: Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips-lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.” Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Evoked here in the mystical language of the Eucharist, this feeling of inseparability was much more than collegial; to Melville, it was as if their minds and hearts were linked by a common network of nerves and veins. “Your heart beat in my ribs, and mine in yours,” he wrote to his dear friend, ” and both in God’s.” –Melville: His World and Work by Andrew Deblanco
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