Eleanor Melville Metcalf

“To go back for a moment to that "paper-piled table" in Melville's room at Twenty-sixth Street: on it stood an inclined plane that for lack of more accurate designation one must call "desk"; for though it had a pebbled green-paper surface, it had no cavity for inkwell, no groove for pen and pencil, no drawer for papers, like the little portable desks that where cherished as heirlooms in the late nineteenth century. Rather, it was open underneath; and pasted on one side wall, well out of sight, it was a printed slip of paper that read simply, "Keep true to dreams of thy youth”
― Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle