Watcher's Soliloquy

via Cass Gilbert - While Out Riding

"In the context of Melville's later work, however, the meditation ["Babbalanja Solus" in Mardi] prefigures dramatic soliloquies that take place before an unresponsive, "dumb" object...." --John Wenke, Melville's Muse (Kent State University Press, 1995) page 53.

"My watch is lonely and fearfully silent;— every where a voiceless desert, and mountains like prison-walls...." --March 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border 

from segment titled "A night watch in the mountains, and a dialogue thereon"; revised in the 1857 book Scenes and Adventures in the Army to "Watcher's Soliloquy."