If Melville's lost "love letters" to Nathaniel Hawthorne should ever turn up (in manuscript, I mean, the actual, physical documents we only know because family members transcribed them for publication in the 19th century), I would first run for the one written on "a rainy morning" in May 1851 to confirm or disprove my hunch that Melville charged Hawthorne with disturbing the peace of "gentle" not "general" readers. I'm talking about that great "Dollars damn me" letter formerly and tentatively dated June1? but assigned to early May 1851 by Hershel Parker in the first volume of Herman Melville: A Biography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) pages 840-841.
In the 21st century Parker dared some prominent Melville critics either to accept or challenge his moving it ahead to early May; see Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Northwestern University Press, 2012) pages 239-240. Since then the bad influence of fact-averse "critics without information" has only gotten worse. In this particular case, however, the underlying problem was that Parker had never clearly or sufficiently explained his reasoning. Given the chance to nail it in the 2nd and 3rd Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (page 566) he said it was "complicated" and mistakenly gave the wrong year ("May 16, 1850" instead of 1851) when footnoting the crucial letter from Augusta to Allan Melville that justified the earlier date. To make everybody happy (except Neo-Communists, obviously), I will belatedly attempt to do what Parker asked back in 2012, and re-scrutinize the evidence for his re-dating of the "dollars damn me" letter. To that end I hope to obtain a photocopy or scan of Augusta's letter, currently at Arrowhead. When/if successful I will transcribe what I can and report back.
Meanwhile, here is a possible emendation to mull over in the wonderful letter dated "[early May] 1851" in The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Mark Niemeyer (Orison Books, 2016). My proposed revision (also begun, like Melville's epistle, on a rainy morning in May): instead of " 'general readers' " make it " 'gentle readers' " but keep the phrase enclosed in quotation marks.
Granted, the difference might not be so compelling or meaningful as the universally accepted correction of "revere" to "reverse." Observing how the world laughs at truth and truth tellers (mocked in our time as conspiracy theorists), Melville flipped (reversed not revered) the legendary laughter-test of Lord Shaftesbury, wherein truth reveals itself by withstanding ridicule.
About a different subject, the disturbing effects of Hawthorne's darkest fictions on his audience, here is what Melville had to say as transcribed and first printed in 1884 by Julian Hawthorne:
By the way, in the last “ Dollar Magazine " I read “The Unpardonable Sin.” He was a sad fellow, that Ethan Brand. I have no doubt you are by this time responsible for many a shake and tremor of the tribe of “general readers.”
Melville found "Ethan Brand" in the May 1851 issue of Holden's Dollar Magazine. The title character is one of Hawthorne's more devilish mad-scientist types, a psycho lime kiln operator who has abused others and made himself crazy in searching obsessively for "The Unpardonable Sin," instead of properly monitoring his own heart. With horror stories like that, Hawthorne stood accused by Melville of causing extreme discomfort in his readers.
The extent to which the figurative shakes and tremors alleged by
Melville are also supposed to indicate real mental and physical distress
remains unclear, at least to me. For a visual image of the darkness that might impart "many a shake
and tremor," literally or metaphorically, to any kind of reader, general
or gentle, you have only to look at the frightening 1851 illustration,
"a frontispiece by Darley representing a wild figure with up-stretched
arms, silhouetted against a mighty flame on the brow of a precipice."
Unchallenged before now, the expression "general readers" has been taken to mean ordinary or common, often with express or implied disparagement of skimmers as opposed to divers. The former stick to familiar but deceptive surfaces while the latter, eagle-eyed readers like you, me, and Melville, brave unknown and often unknowable depths of things. Already in Mardi (1849) William Charvat found symptoms of Melville's downright hostility "to the general reader, and to the world."
Charvat, William. “Melville and the Common Reader.” Studies in Bibliography, vol. 12, 1959, pages 41–57 at page 49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40371255. Accessed 15 May 2023.
In Charvat's influential view the "tribe of general readers" means those "who would not tolerate the unpleasant truth" but might be tricked by disguised "profundities," artfully hidden "under a pleasant or sensational narrative surface" (page 52).
With more attention to context, as Charlene Avallone pointed out in the late 1980's, Melville's expression "general readers" may be understood to designate readers of magazines.
Avallone, Charlene. “Calculations for Popularity: Melville’s Pierre and Holden’s Dollar Magazine.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 43, no. 1, 1988, pages 82–110. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3044982. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Which is to say, most everyone. Although Avallone adopts the term general readers throughout, her excellent case for the familiarity of magazine readers with wildly sensational matter effectively undercuts Melville's reported claim that "the tribe of 'general readers' " would somehow have been distressed by provocative content in Hawthorne's magazine fictions.
In usages at mid century, when Melville was writing to Hawthorne, the term general readers usually denotes readers either of periodical literature (magazines and newspapers) or works of non-fiction, for example textbooks of history and popular science, say Anatomy and Physiology.
Springfield, Mass. Republican - April 28, 1851
Concerning the longer phrase "tribe of general readers," Melville's usage as transcribed by Julian Hawthorne in 1884 is the only one published in 19th century works accessible via Google Books and HathiTrust Digital Library. Zero hits before 1900 outside of Melville's letter to Hawthorne.
On the other hand, searching in the same databases for "tribe of gentle readers" yields two results in British sources, each occurring in a piece of literary criticism. First, from the cutting review of The Spirit of Discovery, or, The Conquest of Ocean in the July 1805 number of The Edinburgh Review:
SOME years ago, Mr Bowles presented the public with a collection of sonnets and short poems. The reception it met with was not unfavourable, especially from that tribe of gentle readers to whom every running stream recals the memory of joys that are past, and every rustling leaf gives sad anticipation of coming sorrow.
And second, from "Canons of Criticism" by "L." in The Monthly Magazine for November 1827:
... Law, physic, divinity, and politics are precisely on the same footing; and so, too, are music, and painting, and coach-building, and tailoring (male and female), porter-brewing, and the manufacture of polonies and sausages. To betray these secrets would not only be treason to the craft, but would deprive the whole tribe of gentle readersof seven-eighths of their pleasure. What would they say to a Marplot who should come on the stage and tell the audience, “ these jewels are paste”—“this robe calico, and not silk”—and this terrible irruption nothing in the world but a pennyworth of gunpowder and nitrate of strontian?” I would never sit in the same boat (as Horace says) with such a man: so do not look for it at my hands.
The first-listed instance of the phrase tribe of gentle readers in the Edinburgh Review for July 1805 is most interesting for negative criticism of the attempt at epic poetry by William L. Bowles, satirized by Byron as "harmonious Bowles" in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. A footnote in many editions of Byron's poem directs readers to the April 1805 notice of Strangford's Camoëns in same volume with the essay on Bowles. One way or another, Melville could have encountered the sonnet loving "tribe of gentle readers" in Volume 6 of the Edinburgh Review and remembered it when writing to Hawthorne in May 1851.
As printed in 1884 the phrase "general readers" in Melville's letter is enclosed in quotation marks. Melville could be quoting magazine advertisements there, but the comprehensive sense of "general readers" would seem to render the quotation marks gratuitous. Arguably, the class of gentle readers might be regarded as narrower, more exclusive or refined, and therefore more deserving of quotation marks--whether used straightforwardly, or ironically employed as scare quotes.
"when Spencer was alive, he was thought of very much as
Hawthorne is now,--was generally esteemed accounted just such a "gentle"
harmless man.
Generally accounted by general readers, presumably. Melville's phrasing as printed in the Literary World on August 24, 1850 nicely anticipates his epistolary reference in May of the following year to "general readers." Even so, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" theword gentle is what got the scare quotes. In similar fashion, perhaps, when inditing the May 1851 letter Melville might have conflated general and gentle readers--in his head, whichever word his hand finally wrote. Well! If Hawthorne can be generally regarded as "gentle," then I guess his readers can, too.
Related posts
Mid to late May maybe https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2023/10/mid-to-late-may-maybe.html
Link above to groundbreaking work by Jessica Roberson on the life and poetry of Sophia Hyatt, presented in the Spring 2020 issue of Studies in Romanticism. Roberson's article is valuable for original archival finds and helpful readings, despite the oppressive and practically worthless ideology and jargon inherent in academic disability studies.
The most thorough critical study of Herman Melville's 1839 "Fragments from a Writing Desk" is still the one by William Henry Gilman in Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York University Press, 1951) pages 108-122. While admitting the limitations of Melville's first known fictions as "distinctly amateurish compositions," Gilman argues that the two numbered newspaper "Fragments"
offer clues about his personality, outline his intellectual life, and foreshadow his later literary techniques. --Melville's Early Life, page 109
After close readings of each sketch Gilman concludes, in part:
It is lamentable that no other writings survive from Melville's early period to study for Byronic influences. But Melville's first compositions owe much to Byron, not only in direct and indirect references, but also in the extravagant expression, in the disposition to project one's self or one's dreams into one's literary creations, as Byron did in Childe Harold, and in the sting of disillusion with which the second "Fragment" ends.
In the final analysis Melville's first writings tell us a good deal about their enthusiastic but untutored author. In his twentieth year, despite the dismal days on which he had fallen, he could write with good humor and spontaneity, welling up out of an undeniable urge to self-expression. His attitude toward life is lusty and bumptious. The suggestions of romantic revolt against his refined and thoroughly proper background are strong. If his enthusiasms are somewhat youthful, they still evidence zest for the life of experience as well as for art and literature, both classical and modern. He could indulge in the wildest of romantic effusions, as in the first "Fragment," and much of the second. However, he could also subdue them with humor, ridicule, and disenchantment.
His literary style has the faults common to beginners--verbal and imaginative extravagance, self-consciousness, undue length. Yet in many ways his first works anticipate the style of his best period. He learned very early to fill out his story with a wealth of allusion, literary, historical, and artistic. The Second "Fragment" begins with an exclamation as do Typee and Mardi; its abruptness is repeated in Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick. The suspense secured by deliberately delaying the ending and the dramatic climax itself are repeated in Typee and Mardi and worked out in Wagnerian form in Moby-Dick. Of profound significance is the fact that the "Fragment" tells the story of a frustrated quest. The pattern of this adolescent experiment with the marvelous is the essential pattern of Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre. Here Melville's hero pursues the trivial end of sensuous perfection. At the very end he is suddenly disappointed. In the works of Melville's greatest period his characters wander over the entire globe and the infinite world of the mind and in the pursuit of ultimate beauty, or of power over nature and evil, or of truth and justice. All of them--Taji, Ahab, and Pierre--are the losers in their quests. The ending of the second "Fragment" shows that as early as his twentieth year Melville's mind had formulated, however crudely, the concept that pursuit of the ideal is foredoomed to disillusion and defeat.
-- William H.Gilman, Melville's Early Life, pages 119-120.
The best edited texts of Melville's two "Fragments from a Writing Desk" are printed with "Uncollected Pieces" in the scholarly edition of The Piazza Tales: And Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle and others (Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987) on pages 191-204. "Fragments" originally appeared in two numbered installments, each published over the enigmatic signature "L. A. V." in the Lansingburgh NY Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser for May 4 and 18, 1839. The pseudonymous author was then 19 years old. The joke at the sudden end of Fragment No. 2 is on the narrator who finds out to his horror that his Oriental dream girl is "DUMB AND DEAF!" physically unable to speak or hear. What an idiot! The narrator I mean, so devoted to his ideal of feminine perfection that he runs away from Real Love the instant he finds it.
Even with due allowance for the exuberance and stupidity of youth, the premise of the "atrocious anticlimax" (Gilman's apt tag, page 113) that finishes off Melville's second Fragment is hard to comprehend. His mystery-girl ain't nothing but fine fine fine. How is her being deaf-and-dumb a dealbreaker? Omnia vincit amor, all the poets say so. Muddy Waters said she moves me, man. Jimmy Reed said if you find true love in this wicked world, sign her to a contract. Chuck Berry said C'est la vie, you never can tell. Big Maybelle said why not take all of me. Obviously Melville never saw Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God. Reject that sexy enchantress? Not hardly.
Explicating the "extraordinary dénouement" and abrupt ending of the second Fragment, Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein agrees with Gilman. Melville's Fragment 2
"has been appropriately called the first of his variations on the theme of a frustrated quest. The final anticlimax is the earliest demonstration of his irresistible impulse to prick the rosy bubble of romance and to reveal its terrible core of tragic reality." -- Finkelstein, Melville's Orienda (Yale University Press, 1961; reprinted Octagon Books, 1971) page 31.
Confronting the same essential puzzlement, Peter Norberg explains that the narrator's "asking to seal their love not with a kiss but with her voice shows he is more interested in a rhetorical exchange than an exchange of sexual favors" (page 76).
Norberg, Peter. "Congreve and Akenside: Two Poetic Allusions in Melville's "Fragments from a Writing Desk"." Leviathan, vol. 10 no. 3, 2008, p. 71-80. Project MUSEmuse.jhu.edu/article/492877.
Failure to communicate in Fragments 2 thus anticipates the predicaments of Bartleby, Babo, and Billy Budd. Invoking Lyotard and Fish, Norberg explains how the abortive conclusion highlights Melville's "persistent interest in moments of discursive disjunction—moments of
miscommunication, or non-communication that occur when one person
fails to recognize the conventions of discourse being spoken by
another" (page 72).
Discursive disjunction! So, not dreadful misogyny? No prospective violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act? Norberg would absolve teenage Melville of misogyny in No. 2 by emphasizing the extended satire on hyper-romanticism:
"the deliberate manner in which Melville directs readers’ attention back to the narrator’s overblown rhetoric makes his rhetorical posturing, not women, the butt of the joke."
Similarly excused as a literary device, the narrator's heartless rejection of a disabled woman after the big reveal. Call it a metaphor, rather than obvious ableism. The shocking silence of Inamorata figuratively represents
"the romantic movement’s failure to propose an alternative to the cultural order of things it ostensibly challenged" (page 76).
Maybe, but my own research, particularly my deep reading in National Lampoon, teaches me that premium adolescent humor revels in misogyny, along with gross outrageous satire of everything under the sun. Not excluding the most vulnerable of our fellow mortals with disabilities. Also, as a committed feminist I refuse to bar women from any exposé of posturing and butts, however academic or adolescent. No More Separate Spheres! Speaking of which, the contribution by Elizabeth Renker to that seminal volume offers probably the best analysis ever of the literary figurations in Melville's Fragments:
The virgin whiteness thematized in these sketches under the sign of the female is metonymically the whiteness of paper and is ultimately figured as a blankness or dumbness that terrifies the narrator/writer.... (pages 104-105)
In the confrontation with the dumb white face that concludes sketch 2, then, the writing debut of sketch 1 ultimately gives way to a terrifying scene of writing anxiety.” (pages 105-106)
Reprinted there from Renker's 1994 article in American Literature
Renker, Elizabeth. “Herman Melville, Wife Beating, and the Written Page.” American Literature, vol. 66, no. 1, 1994, pp. 123–150. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2927436.
and reprised in Strike Through the Mask (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pages 59-60.
Renker's biography-based reading of Fragments has the added virtue of accounting for violence associated with women and scenes of writing in later texts like Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) and The Tartarus of Maids (April 1855), even if you would acquit Melville on the unproven criminal charge of physically abusing his spouse.
Norberg footnoted Gilman but not Renker or Metlitsky Finkelstein. In due course, Norberg is now ignored along with Gilman, Renker, and Metlitsky Finkelstein in the recent Leviathan essay by Daniel Diez Couch and Michael Anthony Nicholson.
Couch, Daniel Diez and Michael Anthony Nicholson. "Silent Eloquence: Literary Extracts, the Aesthetics of Disability, and Melville’s “Fragments”." Leviathan, vol. 23 no. 1, 2021, p. 7-23. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lvn.2021.0001.
In this particular quaternity of academic neglect, the women get the worst of it. Renker, instead of receiving credit for her most original and provocative and directly relevant work, gets cited with the late Douglas Robillard for a minor and easily dismissible reference to "Fragments from a Writing Desk" in their introductory essay on Melville and Poetry in the October 2007 Leviathan. Amnesia has definite advantages here. You could not very well acknowledge Renker on Melville's "Fragments" in American Literature or No Separate Spheres! or Strike through the Mask and still claim that critics have dismissed it. Best forget her, and suppress the terrifying realization that Leviathan and The Melville Society are just nothing but cultural monuments to gender-based violence and misogyny, not to mention white supremacy. As predicted in another post, Melville is bound to be cancelled and soon.
Renker's dangerous take is bravely rescued by Michael D. Snediker, riffing on Fragment 2 in the preface of his latest book, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). On Melville's alleged abuse of his wife, Snediker accepts the guilty verdict rendered by Renker as "well documented." Reverential and creepy invocations of Foucault, especially his refiguring of the Cheshire cat's disembodied grin, are not similarly qualified by any reference to the French philosopher's sexual abuse of children in Tunisia. Better-evidenced by eyewitness testimony which is more compelling than the documented rumor and hearsay in Melville's case. However, breaking news of Foucault's abuse of North African boys only emerged in March 2021, months too late for Snediker to have confronted it in Contingent Figure.
Snediker seems the rarest of postmodern theorists in that he has not forgotten how to read. Closely reading and re-reading Fragment 2 in the wake of Renker and the 2006 introductory essay by Samuel Otter to a special issue of Leviathan on Melville and Disability, Snediker frames the big critical question
“How, then, to cull from the invectively capitalized last words of Melville’s text some sense of his profound and provoking explorations of disability?
but realizes, as a reader, you don't. Melville's Inamorata is, after all, imaginary. A fictional character, and barely that in Snediker's view:
“Conceiving Inamorata as a woman treated like an object asks,
however, that we suspend our readerly disbelief regarding her elaborate textual flatness.” -- Michael D. Snediker, preface to Contingent Figure.
As Snediker suggests, the personality of Inamorata gets lost in the oriental opulence of her surroundings. The felt "flatness" of Melville's representation betrays her essence which is literary and thus unreal. Considering the skill with which Couch and Nicholson dissect Melville's first Fragment as a generic collection of literary "beauties," it is strange to find them ignoring literary antecedents of Inamorata in Byron's The Bride of Abydos, Moore's Lalla Rookh, and The Arabian Nights. Metlitsky Finkelstein surveyed those and more sixty years ago, discovering along the way
an American model for Melville's story which has not been previously noted. The subject of the deaf and dumb mistress is the theme of Amir Khan, a popular Oriental verse romance by a young American poet, Lucretia Maria Davidson, who died in 1825 at the age of sixteen....
Like the Inamorata of Melville's Fragment, Amreta, the heroine, is deaf and dumband is characterized by "long dark lashes" and an appropriately amorous name. The passionate ardor of Amir Khan meets no response in the beauteous damsel. But Amir Khan finally resorts to a ruse. With the help of a magic herb, he pretends to be dead and succeeds in evoking speech in his mistress. Unlike Melville's Fragment, the story ends happily.
... Miss Davidson was inspired by the Arabian Nights and even more by Thomas Moore, the Western prophet of Oriental romance. One cannot help feeling that Amir Khan may have given Melville a special impetus for his "hoax."
With Amir Khan before us, Inamorata looks a lot like Davidson's disabled heroine, Amreta. When Melville's narrator begs Inamorata,
Speak! Tell me, thou cruel! Does thy heart send forth vital fluid like my own? Am I loved,--even wildly, madly, as I love?
he echoes Amir Khan's plea to Amreta:
"Oh speak! Amreta--but one word! Let one soft sigh confess I'm heard."
Davidson's models were Melville's, too. As pointed out in a contemporary review, Davidson's poems
“are to be estimated by the age of the writer, and by the subjects of imitation before her—Byron and Moore; from whom all our young poets and poetesses have more or less made their sketches. And why not,—if the sketches be tolerable? " -- New York Spectator, June 2, 1829.
Peter A. Obuchowski takes Fragments as Melville's satire of Edgar Allan Poe and his ornate stylings, especially as manifested in the 1838 short story Ligeia.
In "Fragment 2," he continues the satire of the idealization of women in popular romantic fiction begun, and put in contrasting perspective, by "Fragment 1." The absurdly saccharine and lace-edged female portraits of "Fragment 1" evolve in "Fragment 2" into a mysterious lady who, much to the narrator-hero's chagrin, turns out to be deaf and dumb....
... The main joke of the piece centers on Poe's preoccupation with mysterious women of ethereal beauty and perfection. In "Fragment 2," the narrator's quest does not lead to a great transcending love that transports him to a vision of Poe's Other-World but to the hard reality (presented as black humor) that the loved one, very much of this earth, is deaf and dumb. The satire may cut deeper to suggest that her dress, surroundings, and general appearance disguise her defects, or even deeper to suggest ironically that if she is a supernatural emissary she can neither hear man's petitions nor speak any wisdom or comfort to him. But the general tone of the "Fragment" is light and humorous, and highly serious thematic interpretations probably should not be pushed too far.
Obuchowski, Peter A. "Melville's first short story: a parody of Poe." Studies in American Fiction, vol. 21, no. 1, 1993, p. 97+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A13926333/AONE?u=nypl&sid=AONE&xid=9008082d.
For Obuchowski, Melville's 1839 parody of Poe revealed a talent for literary satire that would be developed and exploited throughout Melville's career as a prose writer, most brilliantly in The Confidence-Man.
Obuchowski is out with the rest in 2021, but Couch and Nicholson, like Snediker, do recognize Samuel Otter for pointing the way forward in Melville's Anatomies (University of California Press, 1999) and the aforementioned essay on Melville and Disability. However, the existence of the 2006 effort in print further erodes their supposition of "scant scholarly attention." Introducing a special issue of Leviathan all about Melville and Disability, Otter anatomized and for the occasion literalized both Fragments with particular attention to No. 2. Flipping the script on the disillusioned narrator, Otter pointed out that "the fancies of Inamorata, too, are thwarted." When boy meets deaf girl, both are disappointed and "the final scene depicts a mutual shock."
Otter, Samuel. "Introduction: Melville and Disability." Leviathan, vol. 8 no. 1, 2006, p. 7-16. Project MUSEmuse.jhu.edu/article/492743.
Taking the hint, Couch and Nicholson extend Otter's argument by placing Melville's Inamorata at the moral and aesthetic center of Melville's Fragments (regarded as one story in two parts). Good! That is, if you can forgive and forget the silencing of Metlitsky Finkelstein and Renker, the disability angle looks promising and almost new with respect to Melville's Inamorata. In developing their case for a deaf female character as hero of creative expression and activism, Couch and Nicholson situate Fragments in the interesting and clearly relevant context of "emergent deaf American communities, institutions, and forms of expression." As they show, literary landmarks of deaf culture, overlooked in previous scholarship on Melville's Fragments, include "literary works by an array of deaf and hearing writers from James Nack and John R. Burnet to Washington Irving and Sarah Josepha Hale." Excellent!!! Especially interesting to me are the examples of Hale's 1828 story The Deaf Girl and Irving's narrative of The Little White Lady in The Crayon Miscellany (1835).
Fascinating in their own right, these two texts supply analogues and possible sources that might illuminate Melville's teenage treatment of deafness. The amazing and accomplished Sarah J. Hale was future editor of Godey's Lady's Magazine where "Deaf Girl" would be reprinted in October 1852, with the revised title "The Deaf Beauty." Her protagonist is Marianne Willis, a bright and beautiful young lady deceived by the romantic attentions of her callous suitor, Captain Hall of the U. S. Navy. Unfortunately, Marianne never rebounds from her disappointment: "She had worshipped truth-she found the world false—her spirit was not formed to endure it."
Hale's pathetic tale of Marianne Willis is an American fiction. Couch and Nicholson dump Irving's "Little White Lady" into the same category, fiction. Granted, with Irving it's good to be on your guard, otherwise you might mistake Diedrich Knickerbocker for a real person, and his famous book for a veritable History of New York. Another of Irving's pseudonyms is Geoffrey Crayon, putative author of The Sketch Book and The Crayon Miscellany. Nevertheless, when Irving in the literary guise of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. presents the sketch of "The Little White Lady" as "a little tale of real life" (page 203), he's not lying. Irving's 1835 sketch of The Little White Lady is a true story about real people and events at Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, England. Irving's first informant was Byron's former schoolfellow Thomas Wildman who had purchased the estate from Byron. In 1831, Colonel Wildman and his wife Louisa hosted Irving for several weeks at Newstead Abbey. From Thomas and Louisa Wildman and others, Irving learned all about the Byron-obsessed deaf lady who haunted the Abbey like a ghost, often habited (like Melville's Inamorata) in white.
Manuscript notes on Newstead Abbey are preserved in the Washington Irving Collection Accession 6256-a, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Transcripts (and some originals, apparently) of letters from the eccentric subject of Irving's sketch are now held there with Irving's Correspondence, as indicated in the online Finding Aid. Independent confirmation may be found in the manuscript autobiography of Mrs. Rebekah Heath (1797-1870), as reproduced in J. H. Beardsmore's History of Hucknall Torkard and transcribed on Nottinghamshire History:
As described by Irving, locals at the farm house where the White Lady stayed courtesy of Colonel Wildman did not know the name of their troubled and troublesome guest. But Irving learned it eventually and does not leave her "nameless" as implied by Couch and Nicholson. In Irving's plain words, "Her name was Sophia Hyatt."
In 1825 the circumstances of Sophia Hyatt's difficult life, eccentric and intensely romantic personality, and accidental death were communicated in a newspaper article for the Nottingham Review. The richly detailed mortuary notice in the Nottingham Review circulated immediately and widely in British newspapers and journals.
In our time neo-racists masked as anti-racists like to project their own racist fantasies onto unoffending waitresses and truck drivers, cooks and clerks, farmers, merchants, and tradesmen, police officers and other emergency responders, schoolchildren and college students, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, friends and neighbors who build and grow and fix things for a living. The morally equivalent crime in disability studies must be ableism. When the victim of ableism is a woman, tack on an extra charge of anti-feminism. Unfortunately for Wokademia, between the Oriental fantasies of teenage Melville and varying psycho-sexual responses of sympathetic readers, there should be more than enough isms to go around. Like I said before in the post on Memory-holes in the Broadview Benito Cereno, Melville will have to be cancelled along with Dr. Seuss. Exile the White Whale to Mulberrry Street where he belongs! Obvious problem, you absolutely can't publish in Leviathan or patronize the Melville Society, once Melville has been exposed as the misogynist and ableist upholder of systemic racism and apologist for white-whale supremacy that he most certainly and demonstrably was.
Solution, re-imagine teenage Melville as the Greta Thunberg of disability rights advocacy:
"Melville's active, signing women serve as a rejoinder to Hale and Irving, whose objectifying fictions combine ableism and antifeminism." -- Couch and Nicholson on Melville and Disability, page 17.
Hahaha.
Objectifying fictions? Personally, I live for objectifying fictions.
Peeping from beneath the envious skirts of her mantle, and almost buried in the downy quishion on which it reposed, lay revealed the prettiest little foot you can imagine; cased in a satin slipper, which clung to the fairy-like member by means of a diamond clasp.
Talk about active signing. Baby, you know what I like. Do that sign with the downy quishion.
Sorry, all that peeping and hiding and clasping and clinging around Inamorata's pretty little foot, not to mention the feather cushion, made me dazed and confused. For a moment I forgot who's getting cancelled for composing objectifying fictions. NOT teenage Melville in Fragment 2 for turning Lucretia M. Davidson's deaf fairy princess into a monster of cosmic silence. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE DOWNY QUISHION! Focus instead on politically incorrect stories about talented deaf women by Washington Irving and Sarah Josepha Hale, fatally flawed by ableism and antifeminism.
How can that be? Sarah J. Hale, blessed co-author of Mary Had a Little Lamb with Buddy Guy and Jimmie Vaughan's kid brother, a vicious ableist and antifeminist?
Mary had a little lamb, His fleece was black as coal.... -- Stevie Ray Vaughan
So they say: "Melville's active, signing women serve as a rejoinder to Hale and Irving, whose objectifying fictions combine ableism and antifeminism." Melville's fake deaf lady rights all wrongs, even those committed by real 19th century women. To clinch their case against Hale, Couch and Nicholson use the popular technique of lying with ellipses. This is also a favorite trick of media propagandists.
Melville's active, signing women serve as a rejoinder to Hale and Irving, whose objectifying fictions combine ableism and antifeminism: as Hale writes, "a beauty who cannot speak, is no more . . . than a statue" (226).
Great God! As presented in Leviathan, the severed quote makes Hale sound like the ultimate ice-queen, mean and evil enough to categorically deny human dignity to non-speaking persons. Case closed. Anybody who would cruelly marginalize disabled people by calling them statues could probably dash off five or six ableist fictions before breakfast. But that only happens in pseudo-reality. In the real world of verifiable facts, here's what Hale actually wrote:
But a beauty who cannot speak, is no more to our intellectual beaux than a statue. And yet, where is the great advantage in having the faculty of speech, if it be only employed in lisping nonsense?
Deleting the key phrase "to our intellectual beaux" dramatically changes the sense of Hale's words in their original context. For Hale's narrative purposes this is exposition, early on, establishing in a general way the ignoble motivations of--
Who? Uh, men. Young men if you want to be particular. Alright, highly educated (rather, over-educated or mis-educated, as Hale digressively dares to theorize) "intellectual" young men, "beaux" who idolize young women for their most superficial attributes. Important plot point for the romance underway, since Marianne's apparent suitor Captain Hall turns out to be one those beaux with bad intentions. Far from endorsing the sophomoric view of non-speaking persons as statues, Hale's narrator endows her deaf beauty with lively features, a "soul-beaming smile" and "laughing eyes." Marianne lacked for nothing:
"She was as happy as she seemed, as happy as she was innocent—she had never known a single sorrow, or privation." (Deaf Girl, page 227)
Marianne's caller the Navy officer is described as generous and gallant, but "thoughtless." The Captain admires her beauty and pities her misfortune, so regarded, of being unable to speak. However charming, he's no Romeo. Hale's Captain Hall is more like Austen's Willoughby, dashing but undependable suitor of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. Both Marianne's are deceived then eventually undeceived. True, Hall's Marianne Willis never recovers from her disappointment. That's melodrama for you. Pity her misfortune! Marianne Dashwood was just luckier, maybe, in catching Colonel Brandon. In reality, the heartless endorsement of ableism and antifeminism that Couch and Nicholson re-assign to Sarah J. Hale (by taking words out of her mouth) is according to Hale the normal view of over-educated young men. True enough. But you can't fault the co-creator of Mary Had a Little Lamb for that.
With mangled texts for their only evidence, Couch and Nicholson similarly convict Washington Irving of perpetrating an objectifying fiction titled "Little White Lady" in Crayon's Miscellany. In our time, even minor literary crimes, or sins, may have severe social and cultural penalties. The code-phrase "objectifying fiction" probably means the writer is done, de-platformed, exiled. Banished from the canon of American Literature. Canceled! like poor Bartleby's dead letters. (Dear Reader, beware. You could be next.) Normal use of conventional language is no excuse. For college professors turned inquisitors, it's bad enough that Irving described the physical and mental condition of his protagonist in negative terms of "defective organization" and "morbid sensibility." The clincher, "Irving's deaf female poet" incriminates herself by complaining of her social isolation.
Reality check: this is victim-blaming with a vengeance, by critics who can't distinguish fact from fiction. Irving quoted her own words, transcribing from real letters and real verses by a real person. Say her name:
Sophia Hyatt
In their reality-denying rebuke of Irving's "Little White Lady," privileged literary critics Daniel Diez Couch and Michael Anthony Nicholson combine ableism and antifeminism by reductively dismissing the traumatic lived experience and creative legacy of Sophia Hyatt, the accomplished deaf female poet, early disciple of Byron, and trailblazer of self-advocacy, as "objectifying fiction."
Sophia Hyatt, "The White Lady of Newstead" in real life and Gothic legend is the focus of a chapter by David Herbert in The Gothic Byron, ed. Peter Cochran (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) pages 159-164.
For more groundbreaking work on the real life and poems of Sophia Hyatt, and varied mediations thereof including Irving's in "The Little White Lady," see the recent article by Jessica Roberson, Remembrance and Remediation, in the Spring 2020 issue of Studies in Romanticism. Valuable for original archival finds and appreciative readings, despite the oppressive and practically worthless ideology and jargon inherent in academic disability studies. Roberson does not engage or cite Herbert's chapter in Gothic Byron.
Roberson, Jessica. "Remembrance and Remediation: Mediating Disability and Literary Tourism in the Romantic Archive." Studies in Romanticism, vol. 59, no. 1, 2020, p. 85+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A625498000/AONE?u=nypl&sid=AONE&xid=9fe2e60c. Accessed 11 May 2021.
2 + 2 = 4-fold exegesis for hardcore medievalists
1. Literal.
Melville's 1839 newspaper story "Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 2" is about the pursuit of a mysterious Lalla Rookhish enchantress who turns out to be deaf and dumb, stunning with silence her over-educated wooer who experiences something like what Lowell George of Little Feat called Teenage Nervous Breakdown. Academic criticism on Melville's adolescent Fragments abounds, for example in published studies by William H. Gilman, Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein, Peter A. Obuchowski, Elizabeth Renker, Samuel Otter, and Peter Norberg; now usefully and entertainingly augmented by Michael D. Snediker, and Daniel Diez Couch and Michael Anthony Nicholson.
2. Allegorical.
As first suggested by Gilman, the figure of Inamorata foreshadows Melville's later representations of the frustrated seeker's dream girl or fish or god or rock or brick-wall as awfully and fearfully silent. Presto! In Fragment 2, teenage Melville turns Amreta, the deaf fairy princess of Lucretia Maria Davidson's Amir Khan, into a monster of cosmic indifference.
3. Moral.
The recent contribution by Couch and Nicholson in Leviathan signals the upside-down state of academia, herein dubbed Wokademia, a clown show devoted mainly to constructions of pseudo-reality and accusing others of heretical thinking and doing. Academia is dead. Long live Wokademia! Until the Dragon comes for Melville and thee, which it inexorably will.
4. Anagogical - Spiritual.
When Life or Leviathan gives you lemons, make lemonade! Melvilliana refreshes with yet another exclusive, this time spiked with the recovered text of "To Insensibility," a long-lost poem by Sophia Hyatt.
Enjoy!
Years before Irving's account, supporting evidence of Hyatt's background and creative artistry was supplied by a letter from "E. B." to the editor of the London Morning Chronicle, printed there on October 6, 1825. Notice of Sophia Hyatt's death in the London Morning Chronicle (October 3, 1825) prompted this personal reminiscence of the "eccentric & romantic" deaf lady, followed by her original and before now unrecorded sonnet "To Insensibility." Who knew she was Irish?
Transcribed below, the letter to the editor signed "E. B." appeared in the Morning Chronicle on October 6, 1825; found on British Newspaper Archive <www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk>. Reprinted in the Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser on January 5, 1826.
Mr. EDITOR, – The notice of the deceased Sophia Hyatt, “the White Lady,” which appeared in your Paper a few days since, having met my eye, I beg to inclose you a little piece from the pen of that unfortunate, but interesting female. It is now, perhaps, about 30 years since I met with her at the house of a lady in Hoxton. Miss Hyatt was a native of Ireland: she had received a liberal education, and was possessed of a small annuity. Her deafness and other bodily afflictions were occasioned by fits; and those afflictions, with the eccentric & romantic turn of mind that she possessed, rendered her an object of great interest to those to whom she happened to be known. Among such she distributed her poetical effusions: the sonnet to “Insensibility” is that with which she favoured me. From the kind attention paid to the unfortunate subject of this letter by the family of Colonel Wildman, I have some hope that the Poems committed to them by the deceased, will be suffered to meet the public eye.— And am, Sir, your humble servant,
E. B. Walworth, October 6.
TO INSENSIBILITY.
Thou foe profess’d to joy, grief, hope, despair, With all the ills that from those sources flow, Insensibility! Oh hear my pray’r, And give a bless’d oblivion to my woe.
What though, confess’d, joy brightens not thy mien, Nor pleasure sparkles in thy vacant eye, No pang can reach that bosom’s calm serene, Arm’d with thy shield, Insensibility!
What though the foe of ev’ry Muse divine; Nor where thou art can Fancy’s radiance beam; What is the Muses—Fancy’s bliss to thine? Thine—undisturb'd repose—theirs, a perturbed dream!
Come, then, thou truest, only friend to peace, Possess my soul, and bid its sorrows cease.
-- London Morning Chronicle, October 6, 1825; reprinted in the Baltimore, MD Gazette and Daily Advertiser, January 5, 1826.
"A Critical List of Authors" in the 1824 volume includes "Critical Remarks" (thus labeled on the title page) by William Hazlitt on Wordsworth:
Mr. WORDSWORTH'S characteristic is one, and may be expressed in one word;—a power of raising the smallest things in nature into sublimity by the force of sentiment. He attaches the deepest and loftiest feelings to the meanest and most superficial objects. His peculiarity is his combination of simplicity of subject with profundity and power of execution. He has no fancy, no wit, no humour, little descriptive power, no dramatic power, great occasional elegance, with continual rusticity and baldness of allusion; but he is sublime without the Muse's aid, pathetic in the contemplation of his own and man's nature; add to this, that his style is natural and severe, and his versification sonorous and expressive. --Select British Poets
On Byron et al:
Lord BYRON'S distinguishing quality is intensity of conception and expression. He wills to be sublime or pathetic. He has great wildness of invention, brilliant and elegant fancy, caustic wit, but no humour. Gray's description of the poetical character—"Thoughts that glow, and words that burn,"—applies to him more than to any of his contemporaries.
THOMAS MOORE is the greatest wit now living. His light, ironical pieces are unrivalled for point and facility of execution. His fancy is delightful and brilliant, and his songs have gone to the heart of a nation.
LEIGH HUNT has shewn great wit in his Feast of the Poets, elegance in his occasional verses, and power of description and pathos in his Story of Rimini. The whole of the third canto of that poem is as chaste as it is classical.
The late Mr. SHELLEY (for he is dead since the commencement of this publication) was chiefly distinguished by a fervour of philosophic speculation, which he clad in the garb of fancy, and in words of Tyrian die. He had spirit and genius, but his eagerness to give effect and produce conviction often defeated his object, and bewildered himself and his readers. --Hazlitt, Select British Poets
And Keats:
Mr. KEATS is also dead. He gave the greatest promise of genius of any poet of his day. He displayed extreme tenderness, beauty, originality and delicacy of fancy; all he wanted was manly strength and fortitude to reject the temptations of singularity in sentiment and expression. Some of his shorter and later pieces are, however, as free from faults as they are full of beauties. --Hazlitt, Select British Poets
Available in Albany by October 1826, Hazlitt's edition might have given Herman Melville his earliest exposure to works by major Romantic poets including Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. And thumbnail criticism thereof, in Hazlitt's "Critical Remarks." Melville lived in Albany, New York from October 1830 to May 1838. He joined the Young Men's Association in January 1835 and "managed to keep paying his membership dues for two and a half years," as discussed by Hershel Parker in Melville: The Making of the Poet (Northwestern University Press, 2008), page 39. In September 1827 (three years before Herman had to move there), Albany bookseller Oliver Steele advertised "Hazlitt's select British poets, with critical remarks" and other "LONDON BOOKS" for sale in his shop at 437 South Market Street.
Oliver Steele definitely had the 1824 edition with contemporary poets, as shown by the reference in his ad to Hazlitt's "critical remarks," a phrase borrowed from the title page. Oliver's father Daniel Steele had offered the same edition the year before, as the specifics of his ad in the Black Rock Gazette (October 5, 1826) more clearly reveal:
Select British Poets, or new elegant extracts, from Chaucer to the present time, with critical remarks, by Wm Hazlett, 1 vol. royal 8 vo.
Daniel Steele "kept the largest and best assortment of books outside of New York City" according to George Rogers Howell in the Bi-centennial History of Albany:
BOOKSELLERS.
Among the earliest booksellers in Albany are William Seymour; D. K. Van Vechten; Obadiah Penniman, who came to Albany under the great printer, Isaiah Thomas; C. R. & G. Webster; E. & E. Horsford, who kept a store at 100 State street, closed about 1828; E. F. Backus, who made a specialty of law books; Daniel Steele & Son, on Broadway, north of Hudson avenue, who kept the largest and best assortment of books outside of New York City. Daniel Steele died in 1828, and was succeeded by his son, Oliver.
In addition to "Hazlett's Select British Poets," the Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Young Men's Association (Albany, 1837) lists two different sets of "British Poets," numbered 1112 (12 vols.) and 1390 (11 vols.). Here is the Google-digitized volume of Hazlitt's 1824 anthology from NYPL, courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library.
Le Massacre de Scio - Eugène Delacroix, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
From the New York Commercial Advertiser, April 18, 1827, under the heading "Greek Fund"; reprinted in the New York Spectator, April 24, 1827:
Troy, April 11th, 1827.
Sir--You will receive per steamboat New London, Capt. Fitch, Merchandize, valued at $55, for the Greeks--twenty dollars of which, is a donation from the Female Industrious Society of the First Presbyterian Church, and the remaining thirty-five dollars, from individual ladies of this city. Though our offering be small, we hope it may contribute something to the current of benevolence which is setting to the relief of the oppressed and destitute people. Your's respectfully, in behalf of the donors.
SARAH SACKETT.
Stephen Allen, Esq. Ch'mn. Greek Com.
This Sarah Sackett of Troy is the former Sarah H. Pardee, wife of Daniel Sackett, a crockery and glassware merchant in Troy, New York. Norman Tuttle, publisher of the Troy Sentinel, identified Sarah Sackett as the person who had given a copy of Clement C. Moore's poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" to editor Orville L. Holley, back in December 1823. Other accounts involve Harriet Butler, daughter of Episcopal clergyman David Butler. As related for example in Troy's One Hundred Years, Harriet supposedly copied out the poem while visiting the Moore family and brought it back to Troy. Any sequence of transmission involving the Butlers, Sacketts, and Holley seems plausible. The families of Clement C. Moore and the Rev. David Butler were connected through longstanding ties of friendship and religion. Rev. Butler was then rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Troy (consecrated in 1806 by Moore's father, the Bishop). Butler in turn was socially and politically connected with Daniel Sackett and Orville Holley as leading citizens of Troy, and prominent Whigs. All three were founding members of the Troy Colonization Society.
Sarah Sackett's published letter to the Greek Committee in 1827 reveals another connection to Clement C. Moore in their mutual support for the cause of Greek independence. Sarah Sackett organized for the charitable relief of "oppressed and destitute" Greeks. Moore, too, actively supported the Greek Fund. In verse, Moore honored the Greek spirit of rebellion in "To the Nymphs of Mount Harmony," allegorizing the plight of defeated Greeks as the overthrow and enforced captivity of an Arcadian sprite or fairy. Sarah Sackett and Clement C. Moore were both philhellenists, like Edward Everett, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay. And Byron:
Henceforth there could be little question of the strength of Philhellenism in the United States; in America as elsewhere Byron’s dramatic self-sacrifice rendered the cause of Greek independence services which never can be repaid. The autumn and winter of 1823-1824 were a period in which sentiment for Greek independence reached a high point, strenuous efforts were put forth to render active assistance to the revolutionary forces, and serious consideration was given to a possible recognition of Greek belligerency and independence by the government of the United States.
--Edward Mead Earle, American Interest in the Greek Cause, 1821-1827
Coincidentally, contributions to the Greek Fund were being passionately solicited and publicized during the same holiday season of 1823-4 in which Clement C. Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" made is first appearance in the Troy Sentinel. December 1823 marked the start of the Greek Fund as well as "The Night Before Christmas" tradition. The first meeting of Troy citizens on behalf of the oppressed Greeks generated $710 for the Greek Fund, as reported in a published letter from Esaias Warren:
New York American - January 31, 1824
Troy, January 23, 1824.
Dear Sir--In compliance with a resolution, passed at a meeting of the citizens of this place, I have the pleasure of transmitting you, the annexed draft for $710, the amount contributed by them towards aiding the Greeks in their struggle against Turkish oppression.
I am, sir, respectfully.
Your obedient servant,
ESAIAS WARREN.
Wm. Bayard, Esq. Chairman of Greek Committee.
Esaias Warren was then mayor of Troy, president of the Troy Bank, and a warden of the Butlers' church, St. Paul's Episcopal. Warren's mother Phebe and father Eliakim had been instrumental in establishing St. Paul's in Troy. Indeed, at first the Warrens and Lemuel Hawley were the church. Esaias Warren became "senior warden" after his father's death in 1824, according to Hudson-Mohawk Genealogical and Family Memoirs.
In New York City on Tuesday, December 2, 1823 Moore's old friend John Duer addressed a large and distinguished gathering at the Tontine Coffee House. Speaking after John Pintard and S. R. Hurd, Duer emphasized "the degraded condition of the Greeks" in "contrast with their ancient splendor and renown." Duer
"spoke of the contest as one in which religion, knowledge and liberty, were staked against infidelity, ignorance and slavery--as one in which refinement and cultivation were opposed to brutal sensuality--as one in which all that is valuable in civilization was opposed by all that is degraded in barbarism." --New York American, December 6, 1823
Meeting on Tuesday night, December 30, 1823 at Creigier's Tavern with his 9th ward neighbors, Clement C. Moore endorsed the resolution of support and volunteered for the fundraising committee.
New York Evening Post - January 2, 1824
New York Evening Post - January 2, 1824
Resolved, That we cordially approve of the exertions making by our fellow citizens in this city, and in various parts of the Union to raise by subscription, a sum of money to aid the Greeks in their struggle, with their barbarous and inhuman oppressors, for religious and civil freedom.
Resolved, That the following be the committee to district the ward and wait on the inhabitants in aid of the Greek Fund....
The best known American poets contributed heroic verses in support of Greek independence:
"In imitation of Byron, poets and literary men like William Cullen
Bryant and Fitz-Greene Halleck wielded their pens in stout defense of
the Greeks, in whom they saw heroic descendants of classic forefathers."
--Edward Mead Earle, American Interest in the Greek Cause, 1821-1827
In 1826, Herman Melville's older brother Gansevoort recited Halleck's pro-Greek "Marco Bozzaris" at the New York High School. Around 1827 or 1828 (my best guess for now), Clement C. Moore composed "To the Nymphs of Mount Harmony." Moore's allegory of Ottoman tyranny and Greek suffering unfolds as the tale of a captive elf, whispered in the "wond'ring ear" of an Arcadian shepherd. Though drenched in the conventions and mythology of pastoral poetry, Moore's manner of describing the shepherd's "wond'ring ear" nicely harmonizes with the speaker's famously "wondering eyes" in "The Night Before Christmas." Transcribed below from the only known printing in Moore's 1844 Poems.
TO THE NYMPHS OF MOUNT HARMONY.
An idle swain late chanc'd to roam
Beneath a grove's leaf-lattic'd dome,
That near a verdant mount was plac'd
Whose brow no title e'er had grac'd
Till nymphs declared the mount should claim
Sweet Harmony's inspiring name.
Here, as the swain at even strayed,
Wooed by the grove's sequester'd shade,
With thoughts unfix'd, and vacant eye,
And idly sad, he scarce knew why;
A mournful spirit of the wood,
Touch'd haply, by his kindred mood,
Soft-sighing from a hawthorn near,
Thus whisper'd in his wond'ring ear.
"A sprite I was, in happier times,
Disporting in the favor'd climes
Of early Greece; when freedom's ray
Bade mirth through all her regions play;
When wood-nymphs with their huntress-queen,
The muses and the loves were seen
To sport, like fauns, beside each rill,
And deck, like flow'rets, every hill,
'Twas then I serv'd the lighter joys
Of rural nymphs and sylvan boys;
And, sportive as the summer airs,
Exulted in my frolic cares.
" Oft, to a playful zephyr chang'd.
Along the reedy banks I rang'd;
Or, sighing o'er the oaten field,
I tried the note each stalk would yield,
In quest of dulcet tones to suit
Some favor'd fawn's or shepherd's flute.
"Oft, in a fleecy vapor's guise,
The zephyrs bore me to the skies:
Where, 'midst the clouds with thunder fraught,
The rainbow's brightest tints I caught;
Then, melting into finest dews,
Distributed the lovely hues
To opening buds, or full-blown flowers,
Round naiad's couch, or wood-nymph's bowers.
"Oft, in a virgin lily's bell,
I caught the purest dews that fell,
With chaste suffusion to supply
Some weeping Muse's languid eye.
For, tears that from the Muses flow.
Unlike the drops of vulgar wo,
Emit the dew's inconstant gleam,
And soon are chas'd by pleasure's beam —
"Dear airy partners in delight!
Who skimm'd, like mists, the mountain's height,
Or danc'd along the limpid stream
Illum'd by freedom's golden beam!
Ye perish'd in the floods and gales
That ruin'd all our smiling vales,
And chill'd and wither'd every bloom
In tyranny's detested gloom!
"A fiend that in the tempest flew
On wing still wet with stygian dew
Rapt me in a hurling blast
Athwart the ocean's dreary vast;
And set me, with infernal spell,
In this sequester'd grove to dwell.
Here, in my lonely prison bound,
Beset with dire enchantments round,
I've seen whole ages ling'ring go.
With scarce a solace for my wo;
Till late, beneath the neighb'ring shades,
Methought a band of Tempe's maids,
With all their wonted mirth elate,
Came, destin'd by relenting fate,
Their long, long rovings here to cease,
And charm my anguish into peace.
For, as they gambol'd o'er the green,
Once more I saw Arcadia's scene;
Again I heard each well-lov'd voice
That bade the Aonian hills rejoice.
But soon the lovely vision pass'd.
Through lonely shades now sweeps the blast,
Where, late, the fairy-footed throng
Prolong'd the dance, or pour'd the song.
If e'er thy bosom, gentle swain,
Was touch'd with sympathetic pain.
Hie thee to where the nymphs now dwell,
And all my sorrows kindly tell.
And say, if e'er this lone retreat
Their lovely band again shall greet,
I'll wake my long-neglected powers;
Refine the dews, new-tint the flowers.
I'll fringe the trees with speckled moss.
And give their leaves a finer gloss.
The painted fly shall learn to fling
Sweet odors from his gaudy wing.
I'll winnow, with my silken sails,
Each noxious breath that taints the gales;
With sweeter strains the birds inspire,
And lead, myself, the tuneful choir. --Clement C. Moore
