Dante on the prairie

Friend. — Is there no end to this trudge through mud and rain? It seems to me we are always the same, — in the centre of a great circle of dank, flat, and changeless prairie. 

"I have been thinking very seriously to what this infernal march may lead us. 'Circle,' indeed! and having escaped from that of incessant fierce winds, we have duly fallen upon the 'third circle.' "

"——della piova,
Eterna, maledetta, fredda a greve." 

Friend. — Of rain eternal, accursed, cold, and heavy — it is a wonder Dante left out the musquitos!

"Yes; but our Cerebus has three hundred wolfish throats which bark and howl at us."

Friend. — Well, I think it won't do ; you have fetched hell too far.

"Only come here in the dog days, and if you can't imagine yourself around the edges of a more than poetical hell, it will be because the eternal winds are scorching, instead of cold." (Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 248-249)

The precise quotation, images and specific details from Dante's Inferno were all added in revision of the original magazine series, Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  The entire passage, quoted above from Scenes and Adventures in the Army, is an interpolation into the September 1851 installment.

In Pierre (1852), Melville's allusions to Dante's Inferno included early and important references to the second circle.  Helen Annn Hauser writes in her 1975 dissertation:

"Hell actually begins with the second circle, where carnal sinners are placed. Semiramis is the first person Dante meets there; Mary Glendinning is specifically compared to Semiramis. Also in this circle are Paulo and Francesca. Pierre refuses to look at Dante with Lucy for fear of some such dark fate as theirs. It then occurs to him that Isabel's face reminds him of Francesca's, and he bursts out, 'Damned be the hour I read in Dante! more damned than that wherein Paulo and Francesca read in fatal Launcelot.' "

 

Also, as Nathalia Wright alluded to in her study of Pierre as "Melville's Inferno," Melville in writing about Francesca in Dante appropriates  language from the Cary translation which he owned.  Cary in the Argument to Canto V describes the doomed inhabitants of the second circle "tost about ceaselessly in the dark air by the most furious winds."  Isabel's face makes Pierre think of Dante's Francesca,

"wafted on the sad dark wind, toward observant Virgil and the blistered Florentine."

The elaborate revision in Scenes and Adventures in the Army fixes on the third circle, but also demonstrates close familiarity with the phenomenon of wind (right, the familiarity that Melville showed in Pierre) associated with the second circle. Clearly the writer is determined to make a structural parallel between the westward journey of the narrator (along with his imaginary friend) and the descent of Dante (along with his imaginary friend Virgil) from the second to third circle of Dante's Hell:

"...having escaped from that of incessant fierce winds, we have duly fallen upon the 'third circle.'" 

UPDATE:  The added dialogue on Hell strengthens the correspondence to Dante's journey which was already present in Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  The most spectacular use of Dantean language and imagery occurs the next-to-last installment, in the dream sequence of the Dantean Fairy Dance.  Overall, the narrative journey of the Captain and his Imaginary Friend "Beyond the Western Border" progresses structurally and symbolically from Hell to Paradise.