wind) and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. Melville's record of the winter voyage of 1856 (15,000 miles for five months), now known as Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, demonstrates that he did not leave behind his doubts or melancholy. Sailing through the Greek Islands, he became disillusioned with classical mythology. He was still in doubt following his time in Jerusalem. Passing Cyprus on the way home, he wrote: "From these waters rose Venus from the foam. Found it as hard to realize such a thing as to realize on Mt. Olivet that from there Christ rose" (p. 164). Melville explored the divide between the preternatural, the religious, and historical reality; he also was influenced by the crisis faced by mid−19th-century Christianity in the wake of the discoveries of Charles Darwin. Melville saw these scientific developments as simultaneously fascinating (as in the focus on natural history in Moby-Dick) and terrifying, representing a challenge to traditional Christianity that was almost apocalyptic in its significance, especially when combined with the more theological attacks of Protestantism. As he writes in the troubled and inconclusive Epilogue to Clarel: If Luther's day expand to Darwin's year, Should that exclude the hope — foreclose the fear? Structure The poem is composed in irregularly rhymed iambic tetrameter (except for the Epilogue), and contains 150 Cantos divided into four books: Jerusalem, The Wilderness, Mar Saba, and Bethlehem. Trying to determine the strange appeal of the work's "detuned poetic style", William C. Spengemann has suggested that the "impacted tetrameters of Clarel" reveal the origin of the "modernist note", and that they thus anticipate the "prosody of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot