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What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life's gate?

Ye stars that long your votary knew
Rapt in her vigil, sce me here!
Whither is gone the spell ye threw

100

When rose before me Cassiopea?

Usurped on by love's stronger reign-
But lo, your very selves do wane:

105

Light breaks-truth breaks! Silvered no more,

But chilled by dawn that brings the gale

Shivers yon bramble above the vale,

And disillusion opens all the shore.

One knows not if Urania 1 yet

The pleasure-party may forget;

Or whether she lived down the strain
Of turbulent heart and rebel brain;

For Amor so resents a slight,

And her's had been such haught disdain,
He long may wreak his boyish spite,
And boy-like, little reck the pain.2

One knows not, no. But late in Rome
(For queens discrowned a congruous home)
Entering Albani's porch 3 she stood
Fixed by an antique pagan stone
Colossal carved. No anchorite seer,
Not Thomas à Kempis,4 monk austere,
Religious more are in their tone;

Yet far, how far from Christian heart
That form august of heathen Art.
Swayed by its influence, long she stood,
Till surged emotion seething down,
She rallied and this mood she won:

Languid in frame for me,
To-day by Mary's convent shrine,
Touched by her picture's moving plea
In that poor nerveless hour of mine,
I mused-A wanderer still must grieve.
Half I resolved to kneel and believe,
Believe and submit, the veil take on.
But thee, armed Virgin! 5 less benign,
Thee now I invoke, thou mightier one.
Helmeted woman-if such term

1. The protagonist has taken the name
of Urania-patroness of astronomy; she
calls herself Cassiopeia's sister, i.e.,
lover of serenity, free from worldliness.
2. See Amor's threat, 11. 5-6; and
see Urania's arousal to desire, 11. 33-
37 and 11. 86-97.

3. Porch of a villa in Rome which

Melville had visited.

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4. Monastic scholar and theologian (1380-1471), author of The Imitation of Christ.

5. Attributes of Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom and crafts, armed and warlike patroness of Athens.

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6. A reference to Jacob's wrestling "until the breaking of the day" with the angel. Genesis xxxii: 24.

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In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners,

1. Billy Budd is a great work on its own terms; it also is in sharp contrast, thematically, with Moby-Dick and so enlarges our understanding of Melville. From the moment of its dedicatory note, the author's private personality is intricately incorporated with his creative energy and narrative insight. Melville was a shipmate with Jack Chase on the "United States" (see Dedication), a young sailor experiencing the cruelties and hardships which he soon excoriated in WhiteJacket, in which Jack Chase appears as a character. Billy Budd, Melville's testament of reconciliation, provides a clarifying contrast with the novels of the earlier period, with the young novelist's heartbreaking rebellion against the overwhelming capacity for evil in man and the universe, and the inescapable doom, as in Moby-Dick, of those who pit themselves against the implacable Leviathan. In Billy Budd the author is at least reconciled to the enigma that innocence must suffer because others represent the "depravity according to nature."

Billy Budd was not published until after Melville's death. The manuscript that he left has been described by

Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., as "a semi-final draft, not a final fair copy ready for publication." Apparently Melville took the story through several stages of development from 1886 until he died in 1891 (these stages are shown in Hayford and Sealts's "Genetic Text"). The manuscript was first edited in 1924 and published as a supplement to The Works *** (1922-24). It was edited again in 1948, and most recently by Hayford and Sealts in 1962. The Hayford and Sealts "Reading Text" is reprinted here. It "embodies the wording * * that in [their] judgment most closely approximates Melville's final intention. ***" The "Reading Text" standardizes the accidentals of the manuscript.

2. This phrase has evoked the puzzlement which was probably intended. The most cogent explanations are that this tale represents Melville's reconciliation to the necessary "depravity according to nature" (see ending, Ch. 11); or that it refers to the sensational Somers trial (1842)-his cousin Guert Gansevoort, presiding officer-which sent three Navy personnel to the yardarm for mutiny. Both of these may have influenced Melville.

man-of-war's men or merchant sailors in holiday attire, ashore on liberty. In certain instances they would flank, or like a bodyguard quite surround, some superior figure of their own class, moving along with them like Aldebaran 3 among the lesser lights of his constellation. That signal object was the "Handsome Sailor" of the less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies. With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the offhand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates.

A somewhat remarkable instance recurs to me. In Liverpool, now half a century ago, I saw under the shadow of the great dingy streetwall of Prince's Dock (an obstruction long since removed) a common sailor so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham-a symmetric figure much above the average height. The two ends of a gay silk handkerchief thrown loose about the neck danced upon the displayed ebony of his chest, in his ears were big hoops of gold, and a Highland bonnet with a tartan band set off his shapely head. It was a hot noon in July; and his face, lustrous with perspiration, beamed with barbaric good humor. In jovial sallies right and left, his white teeth flashing into view, he rollicked along, the center of a company of his shipmates. These were made up of such an assortment of tribes and complexions as would have well fitted them to be marched up by Anacharsis Cloots before the bar of the first French Assembly as Representatives of the Human Race. At each spontaneous tribute rendered by the wayfarers to this black pagod of a fellow-the tribute of a pause and stare, and less frequently an exclamation-the motley retinue showed that they took that sort of pride in the evoker of it which the Assyrian priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful prostrated themselves.

To return. If in some cases a bit of a nautical Murat 5 in setting forth his person ashore, the Handsome Sailor of the period in question evinced nothing of the dandified Billy-be-Dam, an amusing character all but extinct now, but occasionally to be encountered, and in a form yet more amusing than the original, at the tiller of the boats on the tempestuous Erie Canal or, more likely, vaporing in the groggeries along the towpath. Invariably a proficient in his perilous calling, he was also more or less of a mighty boxer or

3. This large red star was regarded by the ancients as the "eye" of the Bull, the constellation Taurus.

4. The Baron de Cloots (1775-1794), leading such a rabble, spoke for the Rights of Man before the French Assembly. Cf. Carlyle, The French

Revolution.

5. Joachim Murat (1767?-1815); French military adventurer and conspirator with Napoleon. As King of Naples he was called "the Dandy King."

wrestler. It was strength and beauty. Tales of his prowess were recited. Ashore he was the champion; afloat the spokesman; on every suitable occasion always foremost. Close-reefing topsails in a gale, there he was, astride the weather yardarm-end, foot in the Flemish horse as stirrup, both hands tugging at the earing as at a bridle, in very much the attitude of young Alexander curbing the fiery Bucephalus. A superb figure, tossed up as by the horns of Taurus against the thunderous sky, cheerily hallooing to the strenuous file along the spar.

The moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make. Indeed, except as toned by the former, the comeliness and power, always attractive in masculine conjunction, hardly could have drawn the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor in some examples received from his less gifted associates.

Such a cynosure, at least in aspect, and something such too in nature, though with important variations made apparent as the story proceeds, was welkin-eyed Billy Budd-or Baby Budd, as more familiarly, under circumstances hereafter to be given, he at last came to be called-aged twenty-one, a foretopman of the British fleet toward the close of the last decade of the eighteenth century. It was not very long prior to the time of the narration that follows that he had entered the King's service, having been impressed 8 on the Narrow Seas from a homeward-bound English merchantman into a seventy-four outward bound, H.M.S. Bellipotent; which ship, as was not unusual in those hurried days, having been obliged to put to sea short of her proper complement of men. Plump upon Billy at first sight in the gangway the boarding officer, Lieutenant Ratcliffe, pounced, even before the merchantman's crew was formally mustered on the quarter-deck for his deliberate inspection. And him only he elected. For whether it was because the other men when ranged before him showed to ill advantage after Billy, or whether he had some scruples in view of the merchantman's being rather shorthanded, however it might be, the officer contented himself with his first spontaneous choice. To the surprise of the ship's company, though much to the lieutenant's satisfaction, Billy made no demur. But, indeed, any demur would have been as idle as the protest of a goldfinch popped into a cage.

Noting this uncomplaining acquiescence, all but cheerful, one might say, the shipmaster turned a surprised glance of silent reproach at the sailor. The shipmaster was one of those worthy mortals

6. The famous war horse of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.).

7. Cf. Aldebaran, above.

8. British naval commanders were per

mitted to complete their crews by force. 9. I.e., a ship carrying seventy-four

guns.

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