Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War.
By Herman Melville.
NEW YORK:
Harper & Brothers, Publishers,
Franklin Square
1866.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, by
Harper & Brothers,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.
The Battle-Pieces
in this volume are dedicated
to the memory of the
THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND
who in the war
for the maintenance of the Union
fell devotedly
under the flag of their fathers.
[With few exceptions, the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond. They were composed without reference to collective arrangement, but being brought together in review, naturally fall into the order assumed.
The events and incidents of the conflict—making up a whole, in varied amplitude, corresponding with the geographical area covered by the war—from these but a few themes have been taken, such as for any cause chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind.
The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctively, one after another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively, and unmindful, without purposing to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward wilds have played upon the strings.]