He was six feet tall, twenty-six inches across the shoulders. His face was a little long but well fleshed, with prominent cheekbones, as you’d expect of someone who worked in the open air, and that clean curvature toward the mouth. He was neither fat nor thin. Brown hair, with big waves of lighter auburn, covered his head and fell onto his neck. He kept his locks well enough under control using his fingers as a comb, except for a pair of short, unruly, crow-black wings, muscular and stiff as a bird’s, that curled back over each temple. Between these curls, and below his unblemished forehead—satin-smooth and rounded like a little girl’s tummy—slept his gray-blue eyes, slightly absent, shaded by well-defined arches and long lashes. At times, at his heart’s bidding, these eyes would coat themselves in an enamel of pure azure, almost opaque, like the sky when the August sun assaults it with full force. A fine, straight, prominent nose with flaring nostrils, a brown mustache, and barely a hint of pink inner lip peeking through a beard cut almost square an inch below his chin. And there you have him!

A few more particulars: exactly thirty years of age, born in 1819, the same year as Kingsley, Lowell, Ruskin, Whitman, and Queen Victoria. A good year. Ancestors all of Scottish descent. Able to trace his origins back to Sir Richard de Melville, who’d allied himself to Edward I in the thirteenth century. Ah! It appears that his own father, Allan Melville, was a merchant. You don’t come all the way down from the thirteenth century without suffering some wear and tear. On top of that, it would have been monotonous to be linked to kings for hundreds and hundreds of years. What’s more, Allan was, in a manner of speaking, almost a noble merchant, an importer whose business required him to make voyages to Europe. He might no longer be related to those numbered kings, but he was still connected to some well-heeled barons and some kings of commerce. When he had no connections, he went to war, brandishing his maritime code, his scales, and his manifest.

Now, in 1814, Herman’s father—or, shall we say, in order to become Herman’s father—Allan took Maria Gansevoort as his wife. Poor, dear Mama! To be able to think about her now, Herman would be forced to flush the sweet balm out of his head. The loveliest month of May could never have borne any sort of perfume for poor Maria. She was cold, thin, materialistic, dry, methodical, angular, and arrogant. This truly unique specimen, a perfect combination of these various emotional and physical elements, clothed in austere, two-bit fustian and fortified with whalebone stays, became Mistress Melville. She made immoderate use of these womanly restraints, which her son would later mention with such innocent humor. God might have intended her to use them to drape voluptuous fabric around her body! But since her—one couldn’t really say tender—youth, she’d torn all the love poems out of her Bible and, though already a mother many times over, she still blushed at the sight of the names of Ruth, Esther, Judith . . . those women who, when you came down to it, had put their unmentionable female parts at the service of the glory of the Lord.