A Truce

Maybe it's from living out here on the prairie too long but these things haunt me.  These innumerable congruences I mean between the writings of Herman Melville and the prairie musings of "A Captain of U. S. Dragoons" in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border."  Originally serialized in the Southern Literary Messenger from June 1851 through August 1853, "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" became (after revision) Part II of Philip St. George Cooke's first book, Scenes and Adventures in the Army: Or, Romance of Military Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857).  Did Herman Melville ghost-write military memoirs for Philip St George Cooke?  Despite no, that is to say, zero documentary evidence linking Melville and Cooke, I don't know how else to account for so many congruences or correspondences or parallels or whatever they are.  What am I talking about?  Ah, thank you for asking!  Here goes then...

Herman Melville in Mardi (1849):

"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!"