A View from "The Piazza"

We return to Melville.  This time to another short, "The Piazza." 

from "The Piazza"
Herman Melville

In summer, too, Canute-like; sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long  groundswells roll the slanting grain and little wavelets of the grass rippple 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 billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and 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.

*****

Something in those quiet words, or in that quiet act, it made me mute again; while, noting, through the fairy window, a broad shadow stealing on, as cast by some gigantic condor, floating at brooding poise on outstretched wings, I mark how, by its deeper and inclusive dusk, it wiped away into itself all lesser shades of rock or fern.

 Who knew such rare gems lurked in the murky, wild, salt-sprayed prose of one of the dreaded and feared members of the oppressive (in the words of Robert Hughes) pale penile patriarchy? Hemingway before Hemingway was born, seeking the one true thing, the well-shaped and shapely sentence. I haven't the foggiest clue as to what this story is about or where it is heading; however, with sentence-paragraphs like those, I'm willing to follow wherever it may lead.  And no matter, whether to bright-lit cliff or trogdolyte cave, the journey has been made worthwhile.

("It wiped away into itself all lesser shades of rock or fern"--alliteration, assonance, rhythm and poise--poetry in prose, the lovely sound of the sea, the ebb and flow, the water of phonemes passing one to the other the coherence of meaning, the force of sheer sound.)