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Honoring the Union dead in Melville's "Gettysburg"

Honoring the Union dead in Melville's "Gettysburg": Original research and riffs on Herman Melville, authorship, and 19th century American literature.

Back In The U.S.A.

W. H. Bartlett's FOOTSTEPS OF OUR LORD AND HIS APOSTLES from the library of Herman Melville

Footsteps of Our Lord & His Apostles, Title-page with
engraving, "The Holy Sycamore"  © The Trustees of the British Museum

Looks like another illustrated book of travel and adventure in the Middle East by William Henry Bartlett can be added to the three already listed in the catalog of books owned and borrowed by Herman Melville at Melville's Marginalia Online. Merton M. Sealts, Jr. included three of Bartlett's works in Melville's Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed (University of Wisconsin Press, 1966; Revised and Enlarged Edition, University of South Carolina Press, 1988):

• Forty Days in the Desert, on the Track of the Israelites (Sealts Number 48)
  
• The Nile-Boat; or, Glimpses of the Land of Egypt (Sealts Number 49)
  
• Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem (Sealts Number 50)

Melville mined each of these works in the writing of his epic religious poem Clarel (1876) as demonstrated by Walter E. Bezanson in the 1960 Hendricks House edition of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land; and Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein in Melville's Orienda (Yale University Press, 1961). Bartlett's works and the groundbreaking scholarship on Melville's use of them by Bezanson and Metlitsky Finkelstein are duly registered by Mary  K. Bercaw in Melville's Sources (Northwestern University Press, 1987).

A fourth title by Bartlett, Footsteps of Our Lord and His Apostles in Syria, Greece, and Italy, was offered by rare book dealer Noah Farnham Morrison (1863-1950) of Elizabeth, New Jersey in his 1926 Catalog of Miscellaneous Literature No. 209, listed there on page 12. 

Noah Farnham Morrison, Catalog No. 209 - 1926

2257. BARTLETT (W. H.). Footsteps of our Lord and his apostles. 12mo, pp. 248, morocco, map and ills., gilt edges. N. Y., n. d. 3.50
From the library  of Herman Melville.

As indicated in Morrison's catalog description, this particular copy was a New York edition with no date given, acquired "From the library of Herman Melville." Price: $3.50, minus the 25% discount on all items in Catalog No. 209, as stipulated on the front cover. Morrison explained, 

"I am specializing in Americana and need the room for that stock."

The proprietor of "The Ark" aka "The Sign of the Ark" or "Noah's Ark" in Elizabeth, NJ had a longstanding interest in Melville's own writings, as shown by his advertisement in the Books Wanted section of Publishers' Weekly No. 1209, March 30, 1895. Based at that time in Newark, Noah Farnham Morrison was seeking 

"Herman Melville's Works, any, state publisher and date." (page 540)

Noah Farnham Morrison retired in 1943 and died on October 4, 1950 at the age of 87. From the notice of his passing in the Antiquarian Bookman:

"A specialist in Americana, he had opened his first book store in Newark in 1893. For over 40 years his Elizabeth store, Noah's Ark, was famous on West Jersey Street, until he retired in 1943. His stock of Americana was sold in six sessions by Swann's Auction Galleries in 1945-6."

Detail, front cover of Morrison's Catalog Number 216 - 1927

The full title of Bartlett's work is Footsteps of Our Lord and His apostles in Syria, Greece, and Italy: a succession of visits to the scenes of New Testament narrative. In his Catalog Number 209, Morrison gave the short title of Melville's copy as Footsteps of Our Lord and his apostles, without specifying the edition or publisher. However, Morrison did note the place of publication, N. Y. = New York, and the absence of a publication date on the title-page. Similarly, Melville's copies of Forty Days in the Desert (Sealts Number 48) and The Nile-Boat (Sealts Number 49) were also American editions, published in New York with no date indicated on the title-pages. Both volumes owned by Melville, Forty Days in the Desert and The Nile-Boat, were Fifth Editions published in New York by Charles Scribner and Company. Although Melville's copy of Bartlett's Footsteps of our Lord is now lost or (more hopefully) unlocated, it may have been Scribner's 5th edition. 

All three titles were advertised together by Scribner & Company. Bartlett's popular works headed the list of "SUPERBLY ILLUSTRATED ENGLISH BOOKS FOR THE HOLIDAYS, 1865-6" in the American Literary Gazette and Publishers' Circular (Philadelphia, PA) for November 1, 1865. Listed first: Footsteps of Our Lord and his Apostles in Syria, Greece, and Italy: a succession of visits to the scenes of New Testament Narrative featuring "47 exquisite Illustrations on steel and wood." 

As advertised in the Philadelphia American Literary Gazette, these holiday gift books were "Crown 8vo" in size which would make them smaller than the usual octavo--possibly close to the 12mo or duodecimo size of the book from Melville's library according to Noah Farnham Morrison. The advertised price of each volume in "Cloth extra, gilt" was $4, exactly one day's pay for a customs inspector at the Port of New York as Melville officially would become on December 5, 1866. As described in Morrison's 1926 catalog, Melville's copy of Footsteps of our Lord and His Apostles was bound in morocco leather which normally would have upped the purchase price by about two dollars.

Melville could have acquired the Footsteps volume when the 5th edition was issued for the holidays by Scribner and Company in 1865-6, or later. As indicated by Sealts in Melville's Reading, Melville's Forty Days in the Desert (like Footsteps in the 1865 ad shown above, a Fifth Edition published in New York by Scribner) was inscribed by Melville in New York City on January 31, 1870.

Melville's other copies of Bartlett's works are held by the New York Public Library in the Gansevoort-Lansing collection. Arranged by Sealts Number, the two Scribner editions, Forty Days in the Desert (Sealts 48) and The Nile-Boat (Sealts 49) are located in the Gansevoort-Lansing family library, box 329. As recorded in the relevant catalog entries at Melville's Marginalia Online, these two volumes were given by Melville's daughter Frances to Caroline W. Stewart. Sealts Number 50, the London edition of Bartlett's Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem, was a Christmas gift from Herman to his wife Elizabeth Melville. Also located in the New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Gansevoort-Lansing Box 329 according to the catalog entry at Melville's Marginalia Online.

Not Melville's actual book but still a boon to researchers, Scribner's undated Fifth Edition of Footsteps of our Lord and His Apostles by William Henry Bartlett is also at The New York Public Library, now located in the Schwarzman Building M2 - General Research Room 315. I checked, it has the same number of pages, 248, as the one at Noah's Ark. Google-digitized images from the physical volume at NYPL are available online courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library:

• https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433081591145

Possibly Melville borrowed something in Clarel (and perhaps in other writings) from somewhere in Bartlett's Footsteps of Our Lord and His Apostles. What remains to be seen. 

Melville declines 1864 invitation from Ticknor and Fields to contribute one of his "stories" for "the magazine," probably OUR YOUNG FOLKS

Writing for "Our Young Folks"
An original portrait of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe at Home
via NYPL Digital Collections

Here is something I found the other day in the online archives of HathiTrust Digital Library. The catalog of the American Art Association in which this newly discovered item appeared was only digitized from the volume at the New York Public Library in September 2022.

A signed letter dated October 25, 1864 from Herman Melville to Boston publishers Ticknor and Fields was offered at auction in April 1926 with Melville's copy of Matthew Arnold's Poems (Sealts Number 21). Melville's marked and annotated volume of Arnold's Poems has been held by the Berkshire Athenaeum since 1972, donated by Henry Murray. Images from Melville's copy are available in the digital edition of Arnold's Poems produced by Melville's Marginalia Online. The documentary note there alludes to the uncertain provenance of the Poems volume, before Murray had it, but does not mention any Melville letter in connection with it. The 1864 letter to Ticknor and Fields does not appear in the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth; and it is not included in the recent update by John M. J. Gretchko, 

"Twenty-three Melville Letters That Have Appeared Since 1993: An Addendum to the Correspondence Volume." Leviathan, vol. 26 no. 1, 2024, p. 66-82. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2024.a925511.

In April 1926 Melville's copy of Matthew Arnold's Poems was offered by the American Art Association along with a "splendid set" of the London Constable edition of The Works of Herman Melville, from the private collection of Victor Thrane.

American Art Association
Catalogues of Sales, chiefly of private collections - April 14-15, 1926

Sold together, Melville's copy of Arnold's Poems and the 1864 letter to Ticknor and Fields fetched $50, as confirmed in American Book-Prices Current (New York, 1926) and Book-Prices Current Volume 40 (London, 1926) page 43. Below, the description of the Melville letter as it appeared in the 1926 catalog of the American Art Association:

Accompanying the above is an Autograph Letter signed by Herman Melville, one page 12mo, New York, October 25, 1864. Addressed to Ticknor and Field[s], the publishers, reading,--

"I hardly think I have any stories by me which would exactly suit the magazine, otherwise it would give me pleasure to comply with your request."

Italics in the catalog description are used conventionally to highlight matter that is being quoted and most likely do not represent any extra emphasis by Melville in the original letter.

Evidently Melville had received an invitation from Ticknor and Fields (the firm; co-founder William D. Ticknor died in April 1864) to submit one of his short fictions or "stories" for publication in "the magazine." Without saying which magazine, Melville politely declined on the grounds that he did not have anything suitable to contribute. Since November 1859 Ticknor and Fields had published the Atlantic Monthly. Melville was listed as a future contributor back when Phillips, Sampson & Co. published the Atlantic, so conceivably the Boston firm had merely renewed an old request. However, the more likely object just then would have been to solicit contributions from well-known authors for the new monthly magazine announced as forthcoming in the Boston Evening Transcript, only a few days before Melville made his polite refusal. 

Boston Evening Transcript - October 24, 1864
via genealogybank.com

Titled Our Young Folks the new magazine would be edited by John Townsend Trowbridge and Gail Hamilton, "two of America's most popular authors, a gentleman and lady whose names will be a guaranty of excellence." In the first issue Captain Mayne Reid began a serialized tale of adventure in which the heroes have to navigate a flooded South American rainforest, titled Afloat in the Forest: Or, A Voyage in the Tree-Tops. Reid's piece would seem to be the kind of thing the publishers had hoped to coax out of Melville.

Boston Evening Transcript - October 22, 1864
via genealogybank.com

From the Boston EVENING TRANSCRIPT of Saturday, October 22, 1864:

ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE FOR THE YOUNG FOLKS. The publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, will issue in a few weeks the first number of a new Magazine for Boys and Girls, which will be a work of sterling worth. The editors are two of America's most popular authors, a gentleman and lady whose names will be a guarantee of excellence. Among the contributors who have been secured for the early numbers, and who will continue to write regularly, are Captain Mayne Reid, who leads off with a new story of adventure; J. T. Trowbridge, who will write in every issue; Mrs. H. B. Stowe; Gail Hamilton; Dio Lewis; Lucy Larcom; "Carleton"; John G. Whittier; the author of " Dream Children"; the author of "Faith Gartney's Girlhood"; the author of the " Lamplighter"; Miss Alcott; "Edmund Kirke"; Aunt Fanny; the author of "Ten Acres Enough"; and Mrs. L. M. Child. The department of Natural History will be ably represented by Mr. and Mrs. Agassiz, who will supply for every number during the year a paper with illustrations. Many of the most prominent contributors to the Atlantic Monthly, in prose and verse, will write regularly for the new Juvenile monthly, the name of which, we understand, is to be "Our Young Folks; an Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls." Under such peculiar auspices the work announced cannot fail to have a welcome reception and a permanent success throughout the country. The enterprise could not be in better hands.

Examples of polite slanging in Hoadley's "Destiny"

Writing to his wife from Pittsfield MA on August 8, 1851, Evert A. Duyckinck thus described the poem Herman Melville had recited "with emphasis" the day before to a group of summer excursionists, in the loft of a Berkshire barn:

Mrs M had a poet in the company and his poem too a stout MSS of heroic measure, a glorification of the United States in particular with a polite slanging of all other nations in general. The English lady in the straw was not particularly complimented as to her native country in sounding lines which H M read with emphasis (interrupting the flattered author who sat thoughtful on a hay tuft--with such phrases as "great glorious" "By Jove, that's tremendous" &c)--but perhaps the most noticeable incident was a gathering of the exiled fowls in a corner who cackled a series of noisy resolutions, levelled at the party. "Turn em out!" was the cry. The author impelled by the honor of his poem charged fearlessly, scattered the critics of the pit, clasping the most obstinate bodily and "rushing" her a rapid descent below." 

 

-- as transcribed by Steven Olsen-Smith in Melville in His Own Time (University of Iowa Press, 2015) at pages xvii and 57-58, from original letters of Evert A. Duyckinck to Margaret Panton Duyckinck in the Duyckinck family papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. First published in Luther Stearns Mansfield, Glimpses of Herman Melville's Life in Pittsfield, 1850-1851: Some Unpublished Letters of Evert A. Duyckinck, American Literature Volume 9 (March 1937) pages 26-48 at 39-40. Accessible via JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2920071. Olsen-Smith corrected Mansfield's misreading "cuties of the pit" to "critics of the pit." 

Unnamed by Duyckinck, the "flattered" writer and doughty chicken wrangler must have been John Chipman Hoadley (1818-1886), the engineer-poet who in time would become Melville's brother-in-law and best of friends. Hoadley's patriotic epic in heroic measure ( = iambic pentameter) was titled "Destiny." All 648 lines of which, plus endnotes, survive in manuscript at NYPL. Citation:

Gansevoort-Lansing collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 

"Destiny" is transcribed in full on Melvilliana, here  

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/destiny-poem-by-john-c-hoadley.html

In the first volume of The Melville Log (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) at page 420, Jay Leyda mistakenly conflated the unnamed poet in Sarah Morewood's tow on August 7th with Joseph Edward Adams Smith (1822-1896), whom Evert Duyckinck did refer to in his next letter home (dated August 9, 1851) as "one Smith known as 'the mad poet'." The later reference concerned Smith's authorship of a recent article in the Boston Evening Transcript (August 7, 1851) titled "A Petit Fancy Dress Party in Berkshire." Signed "Miantonomah," the article reported on a recent masquerade hosted by the Morewoods at Broad Hall. Forwarding a clipping of Smith's pseudonymous newspaper account, Duyckinck was able to give his wife the inside scoop on who wrote it.

But Sarah Morewood enjoyed the company of more than one Pittsfield poet. In public, she and Hoadley had already been linked as lyricists. In September 1850 the formal dedication of the new Pittsfield Cemetery had featured the singing of "Original odes by John C. Hoadley, Mrs. Emily P. Dodge, and Mrs. J. R. Morewood," as duly documented by J. E. A. Smith himself in the second volume of his History of Pittsfield (1876) on page 605. And duly recorded by Leyda in the 1850 section of the Melville Log. In the 1851 section of the Log, however, perhaps exclusively focused on Duyckinck's recognition of J. E. A. Smith as the "mad poet'" of Pittsfield, Leyda seems to have reprinted the closest thing he could find in the way of patriotic verse by Smith, a stanza from the ballad "On Onota's Graceful Shore" as collected in the 1896 volume Souvenir Verse and Story. On closer inspection, however, none of the essential details that Duyckinck gave about the form and content of the poem Melville read aloud can fairly be said to describe Smith's poem. "On Onota's Graceful Shore" is a ballad of 11 stanzas, in all comprising 88 lines of iambic tetrameter. Duyckinck specified they were "sounding lines" of "heroic measure," meaning pentameter. As Duyckinck described it, the poem Melville read was a long one, with enough lines of verse to make a "stout" manuscript. Hoadley's "Destiny" has the requisite length (648 lines neatly written out in a bound volume of 53 pages); Smith's ballad does not. "On Onota's Graceful Shore" offers a modest, frequently wistful tribute to the memory of local hero David Noble and his courageous actions during the American Revolution. The scope in Smith's poem is decidedly regional and the overall tone, elegiac. Duyckinck specified a bolder and far more comprehensive theme, "glorification of the United States." 

Documentary evidence of "Melville's hearty praises" for Hoadley's ambitious "national poem" is provided in the letter from Pittsfield that Hoadley wrote on September 9, 1851 to Evert A. Duyckinck in New York City. Now in the Duyckinck family papers and accessible via The New York Public Library Digital Collections, Hoadley's 1851 letter to Duyckinck is not recorded in Jay Leyda's Melville Log or Hershel Parker's biography. 

Citation:

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Hoadley, John Chipman (1818-1886)" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1851. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/d9236f50-693b-0133-a932-00505686d14e

Besides being "a glorification of the United States," in the words of Evert Duyckinck, the poem that Melville read aloud in August 1851 also meted out "a polite slanging of all other nations." Below are some examples from Hoadley's national poem of what Duyckinck probably meant by "slanging" directed at other countries. Hoadley's "Destiny" has lots of slanging; Smith's ballad little to none--certainly none that would have bothered any of Melville's auditors. Evert Duyckinck thought "the English lady" in attendance had good reason to be offended by criticism of her native country in the patriotic verses Melville read aloud. While accurate in the case of "Destiny," Duyckinck's claim that England "was not particularly complimented" is not true of "On Onota's Graceful Shore," where "English barons" turned Crusaders are expressly exalted by Smith as models of gallantry for selling their lands to finance military expeditions to the Holy Land:

"To wrench from Moslem rule the sod
Where once the Savior's feet had trod."  -- J. E. A. Smith,  On Onota's Graceful Shore

Polite slanging of other nations in "Destiny"

ITALY, GREECE, HISPANIA, POLAND, HUNGARY

Who saith “My Country,” neath Italian skies,

Bids scenes of faded mouldering grandeur round him rise!

Who speaks the word among the Grecian isles,

Grey heaps of gorgeous ruins round him piles;

Who breathes the tone upon Hispania’s shore,

Evokes the ghosts of glories known no more!

Who dared to lisp the sound on Poland’s plains,

Would pour her life-blood through his ebbing veins;

Who called fair Hungary by the sacred name,

But furrowed fields of new-made graves could claim! --lines 39-48

ENGLAND

Gaunt, blue-lipped famine gnawing at her heart,

Her workhouse peopling faster than her mart,

The proud possessions of her princeliest Peers

The peaceful prey of plebian auctioneers,

The angile hate of Cambrian, Saxon, Celt,

Hardened in fires where hearts of stone would melt,

Her vast dominions bound by force alone

To the frail pillars of her crumbling throne.

Infatuate England sees a healthful blush

In wan consumptive’s grave-foretelling flush,

While pride and famine share her vaunted home,

And her vast Empire crumbles to its doom! -- lines 65-76

IRELAND

Ireland! thou paradox, ne’er understood!

Spendthrift of genius, prodigal of blood,

Lighting all histories with immortal deeds,

Propping all empires, championing all creeds;

Thou modern Hercules! thou faith of the engineer,

Who in thy name bids mountains disappear;

Pouring thy blood and sweat on every soil,

Thou Greek of glory, and thou Swiss of toil!

Mean E’en Meanwhile thy sword and spade enrich the earth,

Thou sitt’st a beggar, at a rayless hearth! --lines 431-440

FRANCE 

The Empire rises from the Consulate

And madly marches to its mournful fate;

And all her eddying revolutions reel

Like circling fires on pyrotechnist’s wheel.

While the vain torch that fain would linger there,

Rests, the burnt socket, or is blown in air!

Yet, gallant France! Until our tongues forget

To name [MS query: speak?] with love the name of La Fayette,

Thy weal must bid our warmest pulses start,

Nor e’en thy errors chill our grateful heart.

Believe, and hope! No longer fooled or fleeced

By purblind philosophe, or prating priest,

Attain the sacred mean, a reasoning faith,

In life to govern, to sustain in death. -- lines 101-114

GERMANY

When the staid German sings of Fatherland,

Behold a living chessboard’s living maze expand,

Where knight and castle, bishop, King and Queen,

No idle semblance, throng the chequered scene,

And the brown hind, in twofold column drawn,

Stands the true symbol of the patient pawn.

A common language, interest, and fate,

Bid the torn fragments bind form the blended state;

The narrow passions of ignoble lords,

Loose the silk tendrils of encircling cords.

The wants of commerce and the arts of peace,

Bid the harsh jangling of her rulers cease;

A base ambition, with its hireling hordes,

Beats the perverted ploughshares into swords.

So thick her ruined castles crown her crags,

So thick heraldic monsters crowd her flags,

So thick feudality’s uncouth remains

Strew with their fossil bones her fertile plains. 

Her wrinkled brow is seamed so thick with scars,

Ghastly memorials of unnatural wars;

So deep the roots of envious hate are set,

So well she treasures all she should forget,

That reason, interest, honor, plead strive in vain.

To weld the links of union’s golden chain!  --lines 121-144

RUSSIA

From the dark realms of winter’s frozen lair,

Clad in the furs that wrapped his brother bear,

With falchion gleaming o’er the west afar,

Stalks the grim subject of the iron Czar:

Chief of the races whose vainglorious name 

Stands in their language synonym of fame,

But taught by contact with a race more brave,

Sums all debasement in the name of slave.

Noble or serf, alike his monarch’s thrall,

The subject nothing, and the sovereign all,

The feeblest fraction of this unit state

Treads with the pride of conscious power elate,

For the red star that lights his country’s way,

Tracks flying empire o’er the path of day!

His armies vaster than the Persian hosts,

 Skilled in the arts that modern warfare boasts,

His coffers bursting with the precious ore

Dug from his mountains’ unexhausted store,

With no weak counsels, no divided will,

Terrific Russia stands sublimely still.

O’er Europe’s vales the avalanche impends,

A voice disturbs it, crashing it descends!

And in its track a buried Hungary shows

The fate of nations ‘neath its thundering snows.  -lines 145-168

Related posts:

• Refresher on heroic measure
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/refresher-on-heroic-measure.html

• Hoadley's national poem, cheered by Melville
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/hoadleys-national-poem-cheered-by.html

• Destiny: a poem by John C Hoadley 648 lines plus endnotes, transcribed here https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/destiny-poem-by-john-c-hoadley.html

• Why On Onota's Graceful Shore can't be the one
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/05/why-on-onotas-graceful-shore-cant-be.html

Why "On Onota's Graceful Shore" can't be the poem Melville read aloud in August 1851

Today I added a bunch of so-whats at the end. 

Why "On Onota's Graceful Shore" can't be the poem Melville read aloud in August 1851: Original research and riffs on Herman Melville, authorship, and 19th century American literature.

Why "On Onota's Graceful Shore" can't be the poem Melville read aloud in August 1851

As collected in 1896, JEA Smith's poem "On Onota's Graceful Shore." Jay Leyda misidentified it in The Melville Log as the one Herman Melville read from aloud, with gusto, in a Berkshire barn on August 7, 1851. Can't have been Smith's OOGS which does not match Evert Duyckinck's eye and ear-witness description…

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) May 6, 2024

Jay Leyda, The Melville Log Vol. 1 (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) page 420

A digitized version of J. E. A. Smith's "On Onota's Graceful Shore" in the 1896 volume Souvenir Verse and Story is accessible via the Library of Congress. Image 30 of Souvenir verse and story : memorial of fifty years | Library of Congress

• https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.souvenirversesto00smit/?sp=30&st=image

Read it closely and see, "On Onota's Graceful Shore" can't have been the poem Melville recited in the rafters of a barn on August 7, 1851. How so? Because nothing about it fits the description of form (epic, long, taking up a "stout" manuscript), content (ultra patriotic "glorification of the United States" with "polite slanging of all other nations") and meter ("heroic measure" = iambic pentameter) that Evert Duyckinck gave in a letter to his wife. Duyckinck had seen and heard Melville's performance in the loft with a group of summer excursionists. In giving the details to his wife, Duyckinck provided a sample of the favorable commentary that Melville had delivered in the form of affirming interjections like "great," "glorious," and "By Jove that's tremendous." As Duyckinck also reported, the "flattered" poet was there, too, listening to Melville's reading and dramatic asides while sitting "thoughtful on a hay tuft."

Mansfield, Luther Stearns. “Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield, 1850-1851: Some Unpublished Letters of Evert A. Duyckinck.” American Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, 1937, pp. 26–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2920071. 

Smith's poem is a ballad of only 88 lines in mostly iambic tetrameter, remembering local hero David Noble and his brave, selfless actions during the American Revolution. 

The long poem in "heroic measure" glorifying the United States that Herman Melville read from with enthusiasm in August 1851 was "Destiny." Recently composed by Melville's future brother-in-law John Chipman Hoadley. 

Destiny. A Poem By John C. Hoadley. 1851

Gansevoort-Lansing collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division.
The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Transcribed here from the manuscript in the Gansevoort-Lansing collection at NYPL:

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/destiny-poem-by-john-c-hoadley.html

Hoadley felt encouraged by "Melville's hearty praises" for his unpublished "national poem," as he wrote Evert Duyckinck from Pittsfield MA on September 9, 1851.

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Hoadley, John Chipman (1818-1886)" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1851. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/d9236f50-693b-0133-a932-00505686d14e

Once again, John C. Hoadley not Joseph Edward Adams Smith was the "flattered author" of the poem Herman Melville recited aloud in the loft of a Berkshire barn on August 7, 1851. With gusto, as evidenced in dramatic asides like "great," "glorious," and "By Jove that's tremendous!"

United States National Flag 1851-1858
via The New York State Military Museum

So what?

1. So Jay Leyda ID'd the wrong guy and wrong poem in The Melville Log Vol. 1 (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) page 420, as did Merton M. Sealts, Jr. in The Early Lives of Melville (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1974) pages 29-30; and Hershel Parker after them. (Nobody's perfect!)
2. So prosody is a thing. And meter matters every now and then. Score it New Critics 1, Melville Biographers 0
3. So Herman Melville the great American writer was a great American patriot as well. In his prime, finally done with writing THE WHALE, Melville extolled a glorification of the United States in epic verse composed by his fellow citizen and townsman, and future brother-in-law.
4. So Melville openly practiced what he had preached in the guise of A Virginian Spending July in Vermont: "Let America, then, prize and cherish her writers; yea, let her glorify them."
5. So Hoadley was the "thoughtful sensible man" (Duyckinck's impression before learning his name) who afterwards guided the group to Ashley Pond. That the poet turned out to be so competent a "pilot" on the trip there makes a lot more sense now. Besides being an ambitious versifier and soon-to-be suitor, John Chipman Hoadley was an engineer and local expert on the water-works committee. Considering his well-documented civic and professional interest in the acquisition of Ashley Pond aka Lake Ashley as a potential water supply for the village of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, it's safe to say that Hoadley knew the way to Ashley Pond better than anybody.
6. So Melville came to know Hoadley even earlier than previously thought.
7. So let's give J. E. A. Smith a break and Melville, too. Smith only ever intended his ballad "On Onota's Graceful Shore" for a humble tribute or "souvenir" to the memory of farmer-soldier David Noble and his gallant deeds. This and all the fugitive pieces collected in Souvenir Verse and Story (1896) were offered mainly as "mementos of the past." Melville's vocal bursts of approval ("Great" "Glorious" "By Jove that's tremendous") would have sounded pretty weird and disrespectful if uttered after any of the 88 tetrameters that comprise Smith's modest ballad. Confronting the inaptness of Melville's recorded comments when applied to such "dreary poetry" as "Onota's Graceful Shore," Hershel Parker not unreasonably figured Melville must have been joking. "Deftly managing not to let Smith gain an inkling that he was being satirized," as Parker has it in Melville: The Making of the Poet (Northwestern University Press, 2008) page 28; reprinted in his Historical Note for the 2009 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Published Poems, edited by Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising and G. Thomas Tanselle. Happily, however, the author of Mardi: and a Voyage Thither was not really inclined to put down the work of Joseph Edward Adams Smith or any less gifted writer in front of gathered neighbors and friends. By contrast, Hoadley's national poem in manuscript presented a different order of composition--not a song but a symphony had been at least attempted. Whatever its artistic merit, the completion of any work that ambitious and patriotic deserved respect. Evidently Melville gave "Destiny" its due, and then some. His comments, however extravagant or over-the-top they may sound now, were supportive and sincerely made. That Hoadley felt encouraged by "Melville's hearty praises" we know for certain, as he testified in his letter to Duyckinck on September 9, 1851, little more than a month after Melville's dramatic reading in the barn loft. Jay Leyda did not miss much of importance in the Duyckinck family papers at NYPL, but apparently he never ran into Hoadley's letter in the Literary Correspondence of Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck. It's not down in the 1951 Melville Log (Harcourt, Brace and World) or the 1969 reprint by Gordian Press with additional material. Or any Log-based biography, yet.

Related posts:

• Hoadley's national poem cheered by Melville
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/hoadleys-national-poem-cheered-by.html

• Refresher on heroic measure
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/refresher-on-heroic-measure.html

• Destiny: a poem by John C. Hoadley
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/destiny-poem-by-john-c-hoadley.html

• Examples of polite slanging
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/05/examples-of-polite-slanging-in-hoadleys.htmldehttps://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.souvenirversesto00smit/?sp=30&st=imagessbookdig.souvenirversesto00smit/?sp=30&st=image