Fairy Dance

William Blake
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, c.1786
Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED Photo: Tate

No better installment than May 1853 (written I conjecture here around October 1852) to show the exceptionally high literary style of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," without parallel in narratives of Western travel outside of Washington Irving. You would have to look a long long while to find anything so fantastical and fine as the Dantean fairy dance in this number of the Southern Literary Messenger:

Southern Literary Messenger vol 19 (May 1853) page 313

Among numerous debts to Dante's Paradise, the phrase "grace to loveliness" echoes Canto 8, where in the sphere of Venus, Dante recognizes Beatrice and "the new loveliness / That grac'd my lady" (Cary's translation).  The image of "many white robed fair" is lifted from Paradise, Canto 30, where Dante finds the "fair assemblage" of saints clothed in stoles of snowy white. With similar precision, the charming "smile of one" that lights up the ball and presides over the whole "happy scene" imitates the enchanting smile of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven in Canto 31:

... At their glee
And carol, smiled the Lovely One of heaven,
That joy was in the eyes of all the blest. 
-- Paradise, Cary translation

The writer's close reading of Dante's Paradise is certain.  Besides the debt to Dante, another prompt (hypothetically now) for the Captain's romantic vision might have been the recollection of Melville's Pittsfield neighbor Sarah Morewood as the presiding muse over costume balls and other memorable social events. The just-published book Taghconic by Godfrey Greylock (J. E. A. Smith) had described Sarah M. as the "cunning priestess" behind the music-box incident of September 1851, which—imaginatively transposed to the Rocky Mountains—seems recalled in the Captain's mysterious experience of a "sweet waltz" while lying on a rock.

As related by Hershel Parker in Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) at page 762, Cornelius Mathews called Sarah M. "Fairy Belt."  To the same effect, Smith's original 1852 account of the music-box incident at the "Rolling Rock" or (later) Balanced Rock, Melville's "Memnon Stone", is preceded by this reference to the elfin appearance of Sarah Morewood:

Her gay, fairy-like figure pressed against the rude, grey mass with such mimic might, reminded me of a task assigned, in some elfin tale, to a rebellious hand-maiden of Queen Mab.

... Indeed, indeed there must have been a deal of witchery in the cunning priestess who made that stern old rock breathe such mysterious and enchanting music. I wonder if ever there was anything in that broken champagne bottle which lay at the foot of the rock. When we had clambered with a world of pains on to the top of the rock, we, too, had music—merry and sad — "music at the twilight hour." Then, as the evening shades deepened in the wood, came low spoken words of memory and of longing for those far away.  --Taghconic; Or Letters and Legends about our Summer Home (Boston, 1852) pages 42-43.

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Minimally revised and corrected, the enchanting vision of the cosmic fairy dance from the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" appears in its expected place in the 1857 book version:

O, seductive combination of the graces, the brilliancy, the joys of loveliest life!—that givest grace to loveliness, poetry to motion, and gala gloss to all surroundings—that charmest by music, that expandest all hearts, and exaltest all souls to the power of love—the thronged, the gay, the glittering ball! 

O, soft viol, and tinkling guitar—last echo of old romance!—to this solitude you can bring bright memories! Methinks I see a "high hall," whose lights might shame the day; the many white-robed fair,-the far-reaching couples, floating in that fairy dance,—revolving, like the moon around the sun, in circling circles. 

The rosy summer dawn is lovely, and sweetly the birds sing in its praise;—but lo! the sun appears, and gives a magic brilliancy to all,—scattering diamonds and pearls upon the dewy green;—so, always to such pleasant scene, the smile of one, must give the light of enchantment!  

If it be not there,—or if it be clouded, no winter twilight more dismal then, than that glaring ball-room mockery.  -- Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 409-410.