chit-chat

"Amid my flights—they shall be our chit-chat, not "light reading"—I shall often be sober, serious, if not sublime."
("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger 15 (June 1851): 372-373)

Curiously, "chit-chat" with the aside in which it occurs was deleted in revision for the 1857 book, thus:

"But amid my flights, I shall often be sober, serious, if not sublime. "
(Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

 "... a choice present of some very recherche chit-chat"
Pierre (1852)

great battles

"The French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs?" Moby-Dick (1851)

"Amid my flights—they shall be our chit-chat, not "light reading"—I shall often be sober, serious, if not sublime. We will talk on all subjects, from the shape of a horse-shoe to that of the slipper of the last favorite—say the "divine Fanny," from great battles, or Napier's splendid pictures of such, down to the obscurest point of the squad drill—from buffalo bulls to elfin sprites." 
("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger 15 (June 1851): 372-373)

Napier must be military historian William Francis Patrick Napier,
and "splended pictures" the narrative descriptions of battles in Napier's
History of the War in the Peninsula 

UPDATE:
 "the divine Fanny" refers to Austrian ballet superstar Fanny Elssler (1810-1884).

The "Virtuoso's Collection" in Hawthorne's short story of that title (from Mosses from an Old Manse) holds

"Fanny Elssler's shoe, which bore testimony to the muscular character of her illustrious foot."

unbounded

"... only in unbounded confidence and interchangings of all subtlest secrets, can Love possibly endure."  Pierre (1852)

C.— "Is anything so beautiful as unbounded faith?" 

F.— "Listen! that's 'to horse.'"

C.— "Answer me then!"

F.— "Pshaw!—Of course it's beautiful; or rather sublime."

C.— "It is the very attribute of human love!"

["Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger 19 (March 1853): 158 with the following comment by the narrator, which for some reason has been deleted in the 1857 book version,  

Scenes and Adventures in the Army]

July 8th.—Those who lack faith that the above was dreamed, spoken and scribbled, as described, lack, too, experience of the human mind, and prairie or desert influences and feelings.

bantering

 Pierre (1852):

"... of old, poetry was a consecration and an obloquy to all hapless modes of human life; but in a bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age, Aurora's music-moan is lost among our drifting sands, which whelm alike the monument and the dirge." 

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger (August 1853), 461:

C.  "Ah! no bantering now—there is a dreamy art of more pretension still;—that would paint the heart;—that would fix the wandering thought;—that would delve for discoveries in the deep mine of man's nature!

"But I have been writing, Frank, something for your especial approval; I have been setting forth grim realities,—and most philosophically. I did strike at last, but most naturally and truly, a little vein of—"

F.  "—Poetry, perhaps?  by the merest accident in the world."