Hawthorne's conscious exploitation of the Puritan background is unmatched in the writing of his contemporaries. For this reason the pertinence of Winthrop's example is much clearer in Hawthorne's work than it is in that of Melville and Whitman, each of whom participates only indirectly in the New England literary tradition. To a surprising extent, however, both Melville and Whitman adopt forms of the jeremiad as literary models that effectively bind their most distinctive work to the imaginative universe within which Winthrop lived and wrote. Michael Gilmore suggests, in fact, that Melville's most elaborate statement of his own artistic values and aspirations – in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” – takes the form of a secular jeremiad, a public chastisement of American readers for neglecting the nation's true literary prophets and saviors. Moreover Gilmore pursues this grim prophetic thread by demonstrating the extent to which Moby-Dick and “Benito Cereno” in particular draw upon the Books of Revelation and Daniel, as well as on Milton and Spenser, to dramatize the terrible collapse of America's millennial hopes.

This view of the extent of Melville's commitment to a Hawthornean “power of blackness” is persuasive in part because of the emphasis it places upon the most dramatic elements of Melville's conception of the artist's mission: his apparent devotion to subjects drawn from “the dark half of the physical sphere,” his celebrations of prophetic madness, and his glorification of “the great Art of Telling the Truth” – usually truth that shatters rather than truth that nourishes.