But aren't there also perplexed young women who might also be in need of a guide for them? Of course, there are. But Melville would leave it up to Margaret Fuller, the Peabody sisters, and other women to supply perplexed young women with role models and guidance. (Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Melville's friend and the model for the character Vine in his 1876 poem Clarel.)
But did Melville's long labor of love on his long centennial poem somehow pay off for him, even though it was not widely read? Evidently, it did, at least eventually. Kenny ends his book by quoting from one of Melville's late poems (page 226):
"Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea -
Yea, bless the Angels Four that there convene;
For healed I am even by their pitiless breath
Distilled in wholesome dew named rosmarine."
In plain English, when young Melville (about Clarel's age?) went to sea, the inhuman sea, he carried his hurt with him to sea (e.g., his hurt from the death of his father in 1832 when Herman was twelve). I would also point out that "the Angels Four" in Melville's short poem call to mind C. G. Jung's fascination with quaternity symbolism. Whatever "the Angels Four" initiated at sea to start Melville's healing process, he himself had to undertake further processing and working through the process of healing his hurt.
For further discussion of what Melville refers to as "the Angels Four" in his psyche, see the American Jungian psychotherapist and theorist Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (1990).
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