Love is all in all.
Thus love at last, as love at first—all absorbing—feeding upon music,—sporting with war:—love, the link of earth to heaven,—love is all in all!
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| August 1852 quoting 2 Samuel 1:26 |
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| 1857 book version with "passing the love of women" deleted |
Can be a bond
(Thought he) as David sings in strain
That dirges beauteous Jonathan,
Passing the love of woman fond?
And may experience but dull
The longing for it? Can time teach? (Clarel 3.30)
the reality was too real
But the Reality I think is too darkly, coldly real, the earth very earthy; but, to please you, mark—I now attempt a lower level.
Mardi behind: an Ocean before
...with charred deserts behind,—and forgotten; and new storms before, but unforeseen....
... a brutality of indiscriminate skepticismas a bad thing. The opposite of that would be
... a blind heroism of credulity!as proposed by the wandering Captain of U. S. Dragoons in the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border. Revised in Part II of Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857).
"Pierre," said Isabel, "this silence is unnatural, is fearful. The forests are never so still.""Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the Southern Literary Messenger Volume 19 (March 1853) page 157:
F.—"And what was there remarkable in my natural calmness?"Note: the line with "never so" disappears from this dialogue in Scenes and Adventures in the Army. Also missing are the words awful and fearful ("fearful" in the revised version becomes "fearfully," thus: "My watch is lonely and fearfully silent").
C.—"It was never so! There was a brooding desolation around that could penetrate a sleeping soul!—There is a re-action of extraordinary excitement,—such as ours of yesterday—that has a power over me which renders a profound silence awful—of all else, fearful! Silence! Then, every sentient of my soul has ears, in which air spirits supernaturally whisper distracting, sonorous thoughts :— in darkness, with long unrest, it verges madness..."
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| via NYPL Digital Collections |
...to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view."Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (August 1852): 510
—all by the light of your chronological, fossiliferous, infernal shell!
Well, well; these long calms have a morbid effect on the mind, I've often heard, though I never believed it before.Captain of U.S. Dragoons in Scenes Beyond the Western Border, Southern Literary Messenger, March 1853 pages 157-8:
It may result from our profession, that the mind has these fits of morbid activity, as if to revenge itself for seasons of neglect.
...her fancies all roving through mazes."Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the Southern Literary Messenger (August 1852): 508
...a maze of extravagant fancies
"You all fly off at tangents," cried Media...
"...you fly off into a maze of extravagant fancies..."
"A truce to your everlasting pratings of old Bardianna," said King Media."Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger (August 1852): 509; Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857), p. 358:
C. "...But a truce to day-dreams; light as they are, the whole world granteth them not a foundation spot!"
