This is the first of the two quatrains which comprise Herman Melville's 1891 poem, “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century.” With its ellipticism and claim of incompletion, its scepticism and enigmatic wisdom, it affords a means of changing floors in “the house of fiction, ” from the large public rooms of Orley Farm to the cramped, secret quarters of Billy Budd. With Melville's novella we leave behind the narrative amplitude and sensus communis of Victorian realism for the compression and “indirection” of much Early Modernist fiction. This movement towards dramatic intensity is neatly captured in the poem's opening, “Found a family, build a state,” which condenses into a single line a metonym developed by Scott, Dickens and Trollope for the novelistic representation of growth, decay, continuity and change in the nomos. The reconstitution of family in the conclusions of The Heart of Midlothian, Bleak House and Orley Farm serves as a cell of normative hope, of the possibility of reasonable reform, in a body politic variously conceived as disabled by history, institutional sclerosis or unenlightened self-interest. However, this residual optimism is denied in the second half of the poem, as what is “pledged” by the establishment of nomos is not the transformation of ideal into actuality, spirit becoming flesh in a radically altered future, but “matter” reasserting “its ancient brutal claim.”