Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business
seem more tted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters,
and assorting them for the ames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned.
Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the nger it was
meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he
whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died
despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died
stied by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
4.23.2 “Benito Cereno”
(1855)
In the year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts,
commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor with a valuable cargo,
in the harbor of St. Maria—a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern
extremity of the long coast of Chili. There he had touched for water.
On the second day, not long after dawn, while lying in his berth, his mate came
below, informing him that a strange sail was coming into the bay. Ships were then
not so plenty in those waters as now. He rose, dressed, and went on deck.
The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm;
everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed
xed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in
the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl,
kith and kin with ights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed,
skimmed low and tfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms.
Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.
To Captain Delano’s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no
colors; though to do so upon entering a haven, however uninhabited in its shores,
where but a single other ship might be lying, was the custom among peaceful
seamen of all nations. Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and
the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano’s surprise
might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly
undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated
incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the
imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable,
such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness
and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.
But whatever misgivings might have obtruded on rst seeing the stranger,
would almost, in any seaman’s mind, have been dissipated by observing that, the
ship, in navigating into the harbor, was drawing too near the land; a sunken reef
making out o her bow. This seemed to prove her a stranger, indeed, not only
to the sealer, but the island; consequently, she could be no wonted freebooter on
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