Billy Budd

‘Billy Budd,’ the title-piece of this volume, is a novel finished by Melville five months before his death in 1891, and never before published. ‘Daniel Orme’ is a sketch ‘omitte...

To one essentially such a novice in the complexities of factitious life, the abrupt transition from his former and simpler sphere to the ampler and more knowing world of a great...

In this love of reading he found confirmation of his own more reserved thoughts--confirmation which he had vainly sought in social converse, so that as touching most fundamental...

Long ago an honest scholar, my senior, said to me in reference to one who like himself is now no more, a man so unimpeachably respectable that against him nothing was ever openl...

Yet, despite the Dansker’s pithy insistence as to the master-at-arms being at the bottom of these strange experiences of Billy on board the _Indomitable_, the young sailor was r...

Now when the foretopman found himself closeted, as it were, in the cabin with the captain and Claggart, he was surprised enough. But it was a surprise unaccompanied by apprehens...

When speak he did, something both in the substance of what he said and his manner of saying it, showed the influence of unshared studies modifying and tempering the practical tr...

If in vain the good chaplain sought to impress the young barbarian with ideas of death akin to those conveyed in the skull, dial, and cross-bones on old tombstones; equally futi...

A profound portrait-painter like Titian or our famous countryman Stewart, what such an observer sees in any face he may earnestly study, that essentially is the man. To disentan...

Now, it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me. It may be, nevertheless, that it is too largely developed in him. Perhaps he doe...

And here, let me throw out another conceit of mine touching this American Shiloh, or Master Genius, as Hawthorne calls him. May it not be, that this commanding mind has not been...

After breakfast I took my stick and sallied down the road. There were many gentlemen’s seats dotting the neighbouring country, and I made no doubt that some of these opulent gen...

‘Just the import I first ascribed to his crow, Merrymusk, when first I heard it from my hill. I thought some rich nabob owned some costly Shanghai; little weening any such poor...

The case was this: The week following my inglorious expulsion from the transatlantic temple, I had packed up my trunks and damaged character, and repaired to the paternal, lovin...

At last a slow, heavy footfall was heard; then a scraping at the door, and another voice said, ‘Come, wife; come, come--I must be back again in a jiff--if you say I _must_ take...

‘Now, then, we’re off--take an oar, youngster; you, Yorpy, clinch the box fast. Here we go now. Carefully! carefully! You, Yorpy, stop shaking the box! Easy! easy! there’s a big...

Pressed by Standard, Hautboy forthwith got out his dented old fiddle, and sitting down on a tall, rickety stool, played away right merrily at ‘Yankee Doodle’ and other off-hande...

Conspicuously crowning a rocky bluff high to one side, at the cataract’s verge, is the ruin of an old saw-mill, built in those primitive times when vast pines and hemlocks super...

Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strang...

So numerous were the houses that Jimmy visited, or so cautious was he in timing his less welcome calls, that at certain mansions he only dropped in about once a year or so. And...

If, considering that mine is a very wide house, and by no means lofty, aught in the above may appear like interested pleading, as if I did but fold myself about in the cloak of...

To return now to the chimney. Upon being assured of the futility of her proposed hall, so long as the obstacle remained, for a time my wife was for a modified project. But I cou...

‘Yes, wife, I do depend on it; yes, indeed, I place every dependence on my chimney. As for its settling, I like it. I, too, am settling, you know, in my gait. I and my chimney a...

It was late on a Saturday night in December. In the little old cedar-parlour, before the little old apple-tree table, I was sitting up, as usual, alone. I had made more than one...

‘Not at all, my daughter. It is a very common thing for bugs to come out of wood. You yourself must have seen them coming out of the ends of the billets on the hearth.’

A countryman of Lafayette and Bartholdi, this gentleman is not unknown to some Americans, more especially perhaps, to some of us New Yorkers. He is an honorary member of most of...

On the fourth morning of each July, about the tenth hour by the club clock, spruced up in thy goodly person and decked at lapel with the golden eagle suspended by the white-bord...

‘Now, gratefully and very fervently do we hold in reverence the memory of the heroes of Seventy-six. Yet who but they founded this order? Did John Hancock withstand King George’...

And then her eyes! They open their dark, rich orbs upon you like the full noon of heaven, and blaze into your very soul the fires of day! Like the offerings laid upon the sacrif...