The Piazza Tales
by Herman Melville
Author of “Typee,” “Omoo,” etc., etc., etc.
New York;
Dix & Edwards, 321 Broadway.
London: Sampson Low, Son & Co.
Miller & Holman,
Printers & Stereotypers, N.Y.
1856
Contents
| The Piazza |
| Bartleby |
| Benito Cereno |
| The Lightning-Rod Man |
| The Encantadas |
| The Bell-Tower |
THE PIAZZA.
“With fairest flowers,
Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele—”
When I removed into the country, it was to occupy an old-fashioned farm-house,which had no piazza—a deficiency the more regretted, because not only didI like piazzas, as somehow combining the coziness of in-doors with the freedomof out-doors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but thecountry round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hillor crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sun-burntpainters painting there. A very paradise of painters. The circle of the starscut by the circle of the mountains. At least, so looks it from the house;though, once upon the mountains, no circle of them can you see. Had the sitebeen chosen five rods off, this charmed ring would not have been.
The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth StoneHills, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each Thanksgiving, thesocial pilgrims used to come. So long ago, that, in digging for the foundation,the workmen used both spade and axe, fighting the Troglodytes of thosesubterranean parts—sturdy roots of a sturdy wood, encamped upon what isnow a long land-slide of sleeping meadow, sloping away off from my poppy-bed.Of that knit wood, but one survivor stands—an elm, lonely throughsteadfastness.
Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew; or else Orion in thezenith flashed down his Damocles’ sword to him some starry night, andsaid, “Build there.” For how, otherwise, could it have entered thebuilder’s mind, that, upon the clearing being made, such a purpleprospect would be his?—nothing less than Greylock, with all his hillsabout him, like Charlemagne among his peers.
Now, for a house, so situated in such a country, to have no piazza for theconvenience of those who might desire to feast upon the view, and take theirtime and ease about it, seemed as much of an omission as if a picture-galleryshould have no bench; for what but picture-galleries are the marble halls ofthese same limestone hills?—galleries hung, month after month anew, withpictures ever fading into pictures ever fresh. And beauty is likepiety—you cannot run and read it; tranquillity and constancy, with,now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed. For though, of old, when reverence wasin vogue, and indolence was not, the devotees of Nature, doubtless, used tostand and adore—just as, in the cathedrals of those ages, the worshipersof a higher Power did—yet, in these times of failing faith and feebleknees, we have the piazza and the pew.
During the first year of my residence, the more leisurely to witness thecoronation of Charlemagne (weather permitting, they crown him every sunrise andsunset), I chose me, on the hill-side bank near by, a royal lounge ofturf—a green velvet loun