compound modifiers with "forbidding"
First published within a month of each other, and both texts conjoin "forbidding" with the idea of desolation, with the image of an empty, desolate physical location: He held the artless, angelical letter in his unrealizing hand; he started, and gazed round his room, and out at the window, commanding the bare, desolate, all-forbidding quadrangle, and then asked himself whether this was the place that an angel should choose for its visit to earth. -- Herman Melville, Pierre (August 1852)
I was joined, after our frugal supper of dried meat, at the watch-fire of the bivouac, by my friend Frank, who came, I suppose, to while a dull hour; but to give him his due, he brought up some coffee, and we made in tin cups refreshing and strong sleep-dispelling draughts.
"Heaven knows," he said, "why guards should watch in this valley of desolation, with world-forbidding battlements; we might sleep a month, safe from aught save grizzly bears." --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, September 1852; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 378
Speaking of compound adjectives with hyphens, you probably noticed another one in the example above from the September 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border":
sleep-dispelling draughts
Melville's Pierre is notable for its idiosyncratic and poet-revealing grammar of compound modifiers, such as when the hero proclaims himself to Isabel "thy leapingly-acknowledging brother!" The example of "all-forbidding" occurs immediately after the reading of Lucy Tartan's letter to Pierre in which she promises to keep silent about their love
"till we meet where the ever-interrupting and ever-marring world can not and shall not come." -- Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities
Also exemplified in Melville's Pierre is the use of compound modifiers with world as the first term. To the unique metaphor of mountains as "world-forbidding battlements" in Scenes Beyond the Western Border, compare:
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