The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)


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作者:Herman Melville

出版社:Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)

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The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)试读:

 The Complete Works ofHERMAN MELVILLEVOLUME 12 OF 30The Piazza TalesParts EditionBy Delphi Classics, 2015Version 1COPYRIGHT‘The Piazza Tales’

Herman Melville: Parts Edition (in 30 parts)

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2017.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 78877 494 9

Delphi Classics

is an imprint of

Delphi Publishing Ltd

Hastings, East Sussex

United Kingdom

Contact: sales@delphiclassics.com

www.delphiclassics.comHerman Melville: Parts Edition

This eBook is Part 12 of the Delphi Classics edition of Herman Melville in 30 Parts. It features the unabridged text of The Piazza Tales from the bestselling edition of the author’s Complete Works. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. Our Parts Editions feature original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of Herman Melville, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

Visit here to buy the entire Parts Edition of Herman Melville or the Complete Works of Herman Melville in a single eBook.

Learn more about our Parts Edition, with free downloads, via this link or browse our most popular Parts here.        

HERMAN MELVILLE

IN 30 VOLUMESParts Edition Contents

The Novels

1, Typee

2, Omoo

3, Mardi

4, Redburn

5, White-Jacket

6, Moby-Dick

7, Pierre

8, Isle of the Cross

9, Israel Potter

10, The Confidence-Man

11, Billy Budd, Sailor

The Short Story Collections

12, The Piazza Tales

13, The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches

14, Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces

The Poetry Collections

15, Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War

16, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land

17, John Marr and Other Sailors

18, Timoleon and Other Ventures

19, Weeds and Wildings, with a Rose or Two

20, Uncollected Poems

The Essays

21, Fragments from a Writing Desk

22, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise Review

23, Authentic Anecdotes of ‘Old Zack’

24, Mr Parkman’s Tour

25, Cooper’s New Novel

26, A Thought on Book-Binding

27, Hawthorne and His Mosses

The Letters

28, Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville by Meade Minnigerode

The Criticism

29, The Criticism

The Biography

30, Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic by Raymond Weaver

www.delphiclassics.com

 The Piazza TalesIn May 1856, this collection of six short stories was published by Dix, Edwards, & Co., New York. The British edition which was distributed by Sampson, Low, Son & Co., London was not a separate edition, but merely the American version, with the British firm’s name printed on the title page. Five of the tales had already appeared in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and the only newly written one was “The Piazza”, which served as the title as well. In general it received good reviews, but did not sell well further increasing Melville’s financial anxiety.Considered to be among his finest short stories, they display Melville’s mastery of writing styles, ranging from the almost poetic “The Piazza”, a pastoral sketch to the satire of “The Lightning-Rod.” “Benito Cereno” and “The Encantadas” are both sea tales, the first an exciting account of mutiny and rescue aboard a disabled slave ship and second a series of ten allegorical sketches set in the Galapagos which present nature in its extremes of enchanting and horrific. Possibly the most original story is “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a study of alienation and dehumanisation which contrasts in many ways with “The Lightning Rod” with its comedic, one might say Dickensian tone. Finally, “The Bell Tower” tells of Bannadonna, a Renaissance ‘mechanician’ who tries to outdo God by constructing a magnificent and high tower. He dies isolated and separate from his community destroyed by his pride.The contemporary review below represents the general reception the collection received on publication:“The Piazza Tales of Herman Melville ... form one of the most delightful books of the season. Marked by a delicate fancy, a bright and most fruitful imagination, a pure and translucent style, and a certain weirdness of conceit, they are not unlike, and seem to us not inferior, to the best things of Hawthorne. (The Piazza) is one of the most graceful specimens of writing we have seen from an American pen. It is a poem -- essentially a poem -- lacking only rhythm and form. The remainder of the volume is occupied by fine stories....” --Springfield, Massachusetts Republican, July 9 1856The first editionCONTENTSTHE PIAZZABARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENERBENITO CERENOTHE LIGHTNING-ROD MANTHE ENCANTADASTHE BELL-TOWER  The original title pageTHE 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 did I like piazzas, as somehow combining the coziness of in-doors with the freedom of out-doors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sun-burnt painters painting there. A very paradise of painters. The circle of the stars cut 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 site been  chosen five rods off, this charmed ring would not have been.The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth Stone Hills, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long ago, that, in digging for the foundation, the workmen used both spade and axe, fighting the Troglodytes of those subterranean parts — sturdy roots of a sturdy wood, encamped upon what is now 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 through steadfastness.Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew; or else Orion in the zenith flashed down his Damocles’ sword to him some starry night, and said, “Build there.” For how, otherwise, could it have entered the builder’s mind, that, upon the clearing being made, such a purple prospect would be his? — nothing less than Greylock, with all his hills about him, like Charlemagne among his peers.Now, for a house, so situated in such a country, to have no piazza for the convenience of  those who might desire to feast upon the view, and take their time and ease about it, seemed as much of an omission as if a picture-gallery should have no bench; for what but picture-galleries are the marble halls of these same limestone hills? — galleries hung, month after month anew, with pictures ever fading into pictures ever fresh. And beauty is like piety — you cannot run and read it; tranquillity and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed. For though, of old, when reverence was in vogue, and indolence was not, the devotees of Nature, doubtless, used to stand and adore — just as, in the cathedrals of those ages, the worshipers of a higher Power did — yet, in these times of failing faith and feeble knees, we have the piazza and the pew.During the first year of my residence, the more leisurely to witness the coronation of Charlemagne (weather permitting, they crown him every sunrise and sunset), I chose me, on the hill-side bank near by, a royal lounge of turf — a green velvet lounge, with long, moss-padded back; while at the head, strangely enough, there grew (but, I suppose, for heraldry)  three tufts of blue violets in a field-argent of wild strawberries; and a trellis, with honeysuckle, I set for canopy. Very majestical lounge, indeed. So much so, that here, as with the reclining majesty of Denmark in his orchard, a sly ear-ache invaded me. But, if damps abound at times in Westminster Abbey, because it is so old, why not within this monastery of mountains, which is older?A piazza must be had.The house was wide — my fortune narrow; so that, to build a panoramic piazza, one round and round, it could not be — although, indeed, considering the matter by rule and square, the carpenters, in the kindest way, were anxious to gratify my furthest wishes, at I’ve forgotten how much a foot.Upon but one of the four sides would prudence grant me what I wanted. Now, which side?To the east, that long camp of the Hearth Stone Hills, fading far away towards Quito; and every fall, a small white flake of something peering suddenly, of a coolish morning, from the topmost cliff — the season’s new-dropped  lamb, its earliest fleece; and then the Christmas dawn, draping those dim highlands with red-barred plaids and tartans — goodly sight from your piazza, that. Goodly sight; but, to the north is Charlemagne — can’t have the Hearth Stone Hills with Charlemagne.Well, the south side. Apple-trees are there. Pleasant, of a balmy morning, in the month of May, to sit and see that orchard, white-budded, as for a bridal; and, in October, one green arsenal yard; such piles of ruddy shot. Very fine, I grant; but, to the north is Charlemagne.The west side, look. An upland pasture, alleying away into a maple wood at top. Sweet, in opening spring, to trace upon the hill-side, otherwise gray and bare — to trace, I say, the oldest paths by their streaks of earliest green. Sweet, indeed, I can’t deny; but, to the north is Charlemagne.So Charlemagne, he carried it. It was not long after 1848; and, somehow, about that time, all round the world, these kings, they had the casting vote, and voted for themselves.No sooner was ground broken, than all the neighborhood, neighbor Dives, in particular,  broke, too — into a laugh. Piazza to the north! Winter piazza! Wants, of winter midnights, to watch the Aurora Borealis, I suppose; hope he’s laid in good store of Polar muffs and mittens.That was in the lion month of March. Not forgotten are the blue noses of the carpenters, and how they scouted at the greenness of the cit, who would build his sole piazza to the north. But March don’t last forever; patience, and August comes. And then, in the cool elysium of my northern bower, I, Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, cast down the hill a pitying glance on poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his piazza to the south.But, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel — nipping cold and gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller, bolting by the snow, in finest flour — for then, once more, with frosted beard, I pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the  low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.And this recalls my inland voyage to fairy-land. A true voyage; but, take it all in all, interesting as if invented.From the piazza, some uncertain object I had caught, mysteriously snugged away, to all appearance, in a sort of purpled breast-pocket, high up in a hopper-like hollow, or sunken angle, among the northwestern mountains — yet, whether, really, it was on a mountain-side, or a mountain-top, could not be determined; because, though, viewed from favorable points, a blue summit, peering up away behind the rest, will, as it were, talk to you over their heads, and plainly tell you, that, though he (the blue summit) seems among them, he is not  of them (God forbid!), and, indeed, would have you know that he considers himself — as, to say truth, he has good right — by several cubits their superior, nevertheless, certain ranges, here and there double-filed, as in platoons, so shoulder and follow up upon one another, with their irregular shapes and heights, that, from the piazza, a nigher and lower mountain will, in most states of the atmosphere, effacingly shade itself away into a higher and further one; that an object, bleak on the former’s crest, will, for all that, appear nested in the latter’s flank. These mountains, somehow, they play at hide-and-seek, and all before one’s eyes.But, be that as it may, the spot in question was, at all events, so situated as to be only visible, and then but vaguely, under certain witching conditions of light and shadow.Indeed, for a year or more, I knew not there was such a spot, and might, perhaps, have never known, had it not been for a wizard afternoon in autumn — late in autumn — a mad poet’s afternoon; when the turned maple woods in the broad basin below me, having lost their first vermilion tint, dully smoked, like smouldering  towns, when flames expire upon their prey; and rumor had it, that this smokiness in the general air was not all Indian summer — which was not used to be so sick a thing, however mild — but, in great part, was blown from far-off forests, for weeks on fire, in Vermont; so that no wonder the sky was ominous as Hecate’s cauldron — and two sportsmen, crossing a red stubble buck-wheat field, seemed guilty Macbeth and foreboding Banquo; and the hermit-sun, hutted in an Adullum cave, well towards the south, according to his season, did little else but, by indirect reflection of narrow rays shot down a Simplon pass among the clouds, just steadily paint one small, round, strawberry mole upon the wan cheek of northwestern hills. Signal as a candle. One spot of radiance, where all else was shade.Fairies there, thought I; some haunted ring where fairies dance.Time passed; and the following May, after a gentle shower upon the mountains — a little shower islanded in misty seas of sunshine; such a distant shower — and sometimes two, and three, and four of them, all visible together in  different parts — as I love to watch from the piazza, instead of thunder storms, as I used to, which wrap old Greylock, like a Sinai, till one thinks swart Moses must be climbing among scathed hemlocks there; after, I say, that, gentle shower, I saw a rainbow, resting its further end just where, in autumn, I had marked the mole. Fairies there, thought I; remembering that rainbows bring out the blooms, and that, if one can but get to the rainbow’s end, his fortune is made in a bag of gold. Yon rainbow’s end, would I were there, thought I. And none the less I wished it, for now first noticing what seemed some sort of glen, or grotto, in the mountain side; at least, whatever it was, viewed through the rainbow’s medium, it glowed like the Potosi mine. But a work-a-day neighbor said, no doubt it was but some old barn — an abandoned one, its broadside beaten in, the acclivity its background. But I, though I had never been there, I knew better.A few days after, a cheery sunrise kindled a golden sparkle in the same spot as before. The sparkle was of that vividness, it seemed as  if it could only come from glass. The building, then — if building, after all, it was — could, at least, not be a barn, much less an abandoned one; stale hay ten years musting in it. No; if aught built by mortal, it must be a cottage; perhaps long vacant and dismantled, but this very spring magically fitted up and glazed.Again, one noon, in the same direction, I marked, over dimmed tops of terraced foliage, a broader gleam, as of a silver buckler, held sunwards over some croucher’s head; which gleam, experience in like cases taught, must come from a roof newly shingled. This, to me, made pretty sure the recent occupancy of that far cot in fairy land.Day after day, now, full of interest in my discovery, what time I could spare from reading the Midsummer’s Night Dream, and all about Titania, wishfully I gazed off towards the hills; but in vain. Either troops of shadows, an imperial guard, with slow pace and solemn, defiled along the steeps; or, routed by pursuing light, fled broadcast from east to west — old wars of Lucifer and Michael; or the mountains, though unvexed by these mirrored sham fights  in the sky, had an atmosphere otherwise unfavorable for fairy views. I was sorry; the more so, because I had to keep my chamber for some time after — which chamber did not face those hills.At length, when pretty well again, and sitting out, in the September morning, upon the piazza, and thinking to myself, when, just after a little flock of sheep, the farmer’s banded children passed, a-nutting, and said, “How sweet a day” — it was, after all, but what their fathers call a weather-breeder — and, indeed, was become go sensitive through my illness, as that I could not bear to look upon a Chinese creeper of my adoption, and which, to my delight, climbing a post of the piazza, had burst out in starry bloom, but now, if you removed the leaves a little, showed millions of strange, cankerous worms, which, feeding upon those blossoms, so shared their blessed hue, as to make it unblessed evermore — worms, whose germs had doubtless lurked in the very bulb which, so hopefully, I had planted: in this ingrate peevishness of my weary convalescence, was I sitting there; when, suddenly looking  off, I saw the golden mountain-window, dazzling like a deep-sea dolphin. Fairies there, thought I, once more; the queen of fairies at her fairy-window; at any rate, some glad mountain-girl; it will do me good, it will cure this weariness, to look on her. No more; I’ll launch my yawl — ho, cheerly, heart! and push away for fairy-land — for rainbow’s end, in fairy-land.How to get to fairy-land, by what road, I did not know; nor could any one inform me; not even one Edmund Spenser, who had been there — so he wrote me — further than that to reach fairy-land, it must be voyaged to, and with faith. I took the fairy-mountain’s bearings, and the first fine day, when strength permitted, got into my yawl — high-pommeled, leather one — cast off the fast, and away I sailed, free voyager as an autumn leaf. Early dawn; and, sallying westward, I sowed the morning before me.Some miles brought me nigh the hills; but out of present sight of them. I was not lost; for road-side golden-rods, as guide-posts, pointed, I doubted not, the way to the golden window.  Following them, I came to a lone and languid region, where the grass-grown ways were traveled but by drowsy cattle, that, less waked than stirred by day, seemed to walk in sleep. Browse, they did not — the enchanted never eat. At least, so says Don Quixote, that sagest sage that ever lived.On I went, and gained at last the fairy mountain’s base, but saw yet no fairy ring. A pasture rose before me. Letting down five mouldering bars — so moistly green, they seemed fished up from some sunken wreck — a wigged old Aries, long-visaged, and with crumpled horn, came snuffing up; and then, retreating, decorously led on along a milky-way of white-weed, past dim-clustering Pleiades and Hyades, of small forget-me-nots; and would have led me further still his astral path, but for golden flights of yellow-birds — pilots, surely, to the golden window, to one side flying before me, from bush to bush, towards deep woods — which woods themselves were luring — and, somehow, lured, too, by their fence, banning a dark road, which, however dark, led up. I pushed through; when Aries, renouncing me  now for some lost soul, wheeled, and went his wiser way.. Forbidding and forbidden ground — to him.A winter wood road, matted all along with winter-green. By the side of pebbly waters — waters the cheerier for their solitude; beneath swaying fir-boughs, petted by no season, but still green in all, on I journeyed — my horse and I; on, by an old saw-mill, bound down and hushed with vines, that his grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deep flume clove through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddies had, on each side, spun out empty chapels in the living rock; on, where Jacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist namesake, preached but to the wilderness; on, where a huge, cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showed where, in forgotten times, man after man had tried to split it, but lost his wedges for his pains — which wedges yet rusted in their holes; on, where, ages past, in step-like ledges of a cascade, skull-hollow pots had been churned out by ceaseless whirling of a flintstone — ever wearing, but itself unworn; on, by wild rapids pouring into a secret pool, but  soothed by circling there awhile, issued forth serenely; on, to less broken ground, and by a little ring, where, truly, fairies must have danced, or else some wheel-tire been heated — for all was bare; still on, and up, and out into a hanging orchard, where maidenly looked down upon me a crescent moon, from morning.My horse hitched low his head. Red apples rolled before him;

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