“Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.”

—  Herman Melville

Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)

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Herman Melville 144
American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet 1818–1891

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