The Bell-Tower

By Herman Melville

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet from the American Renaissance period. Most of his writings were published between 1846 and 1857. Best known for his sea adventure Typee (1846) and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), he was almost forgotten during the last thirty years of his life. Melville's writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. In “ The Bell Tower” the architect Bannadonna wants to challenge the laws of nature, building the most beautiful tower of Italy, a new Tower of Babel, with a huge iron bell. The architect is the victim of his own obsession as he sees in man and in his technological knowledge the real God. His creations become the symbols of his crimes. While making the tower he kills one of his employees, his skull will be part of the surface of the bell…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Herman Melville
• Release date: Jan 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9788892540798

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and poet. His most notable work, Moby Dick, is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

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The Bell-Tower

by

Herman Melville

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The Bell-Tower.

In the south of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan.

As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mound — last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable, and true gauge which cometh by prostration — so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain.

From that tree-top, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung. A stone pine; a metallic aviary in its crown: the Bell–Tower, built by the great mechanician, the unblest foundling, Bannadonna.

Like Babel’s, its base was laid in a high hour of renovated earth, following the second deluge, when the waters of the Dark Ages had dried up, and once more the green appeared. No wonder that, after so long and deep submersion, the jubilant expectation of the race should, as with Noah’s sons, soar into Shinar aspiration.

In firm resolve, no man in Europe at that period went beyond