The feast of vultures when the day is done

In December 1849, he spent parts of two days that month with one of Turner’s oldest friends, the poet and wealthy collector Samuel Rogers. In the Royal Academy catalog for The Angel Standing in the Sun, Turner cited two lines from Rogers as the only contemporary inspiration for his painting: “The morning march that flashes to the sun; / The feast of vultures when the day is done.”9

Thanks largely to the high reputation of Typee in England, Rogers welcomed his young American visitor warmly, and gave him a tour of his spacious townhouse in London, near Buckingham Palace. It was as much a museum as a residence, with the walls adorned by some of the finest art in any private home—a Rembrandt self-portrait, a large historical scene by Rubens, a majestic Titian, four paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, five by Nicolas Poussin, eleven by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and several works by Turner. On December 20 Melville stayed for three hours, and came back on the twenty-third for another three hours with Rogers, who was a walking encyclopedia of British life and culture, an old man famed for his anecdotes about the many famous people he had known—from Romantics like Byron to the recent Victorians like Tennyson. There were few men of genius he knew better than Turner, who was then ill and nearing the end of his life.

Samuel Rogers and Turner had worked closely together in 1830 on an expensive book of poetry and engravings called simply Italy. (“An interesting book to every person of taste,” Melville would later say of it.) A few years later the two men combined their talents again to create an illustrated version of one of Rogers’s best poems, The Voyage of Columbus. The poet conceived of the explorer as a man of peace betrayed by future generations who would fight over the New World and spoil paradise with the violence and greed of the Old. It was in this poem—in a canto titled “The flight of an Angel of Darkness”—that Rogers so neatly captured the disillusion of heroes who begin their adventures with high hopes (“The morning march that flashes to the sun”) only to find death and defeat in the end (“The feast of vultures when the day is done”).10

For two mornings in London, Herman Melville was the guest in a house where poetry, painting, angels, vultures, Turner’s career, fame, and ambition could all occupy the same intellectual space in a setting that was a veritable temple of art. The young man would never again be entertained in any place that could compare with Rogers’s house at 22 St. James’s Place. An engraving by Charles Mottram in 1815 shows Byron, Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Turner, and Wordsworth gathered around the very same dining table where Melville was served breakfast in December. This was a heady moment for an American writer with so few years of literary experience behind him. It provided the kind of inspiration that Melville would describe in his Hawthorne essay: “Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”

The treasures inside Rogers’s home were worth far more than the building itself, but Rogers liked to think of his tall townhouse “as a fitting frame to a beautiful picture, or a precious binding to a rare book.” More than his poetry or his money, this house had brought him the greatest renown in his old age. So many visitors to England longed for a glimpse inside that a London guidebook included a detailed list of its most valuable contents, and then added the discouraging note: “Mode of Admission—A letter of introduction (the only mode).” The information was in a section grandly labeled “Houses of the Principal Nobility and Gentry.” (Besides his just claims as a celebrated author, Melville was also able to supply Rogers with a letter of introduction from Edward Everett, then president of Harvard and a former ambassador to Britain, as well as a friend of Judge Shaw.)11

9. Finley, Angel in the Sun, 179; Bell, A List of the Works Contributed to Public Exhibitions by J. M. W. Turner, R.A., 155; Rogers, The Voyage of Columbus in Poems, 131.
 10. HM’s comment on Italy is quoted in HMJ, 368.
 11. Roberts, Samuel Rogers and His Circle, 48; Cunningham, Modern London, 2

Michael Shelden
Melville in Love