More on margins, above and below

Photo Credit: kitty

Melville's Pierre features another example of the word-stream, text-as-river metaphor, supplementing previous posts on wide margins and on Washington Irving:

It was a little curious and rather sardonically diverting, to compare these masterly, yet not wholly successful, and indeterminate tactics of the accomplished Glen, with the unfaltering stream of Beloved Pierres, which not only flowed along the top margin of all his earlier letters, but here and there, from their subterranean channel, flashed out in bright intervals, through all the succeeding lines.  --Pierre (1852)

As in the prairie tribute to Irving, Melville exploits the double sense of "margin" as space on a page and as the edge or bank of a river. Not only that, Melville (in what for him is a characteristic image) pictures the word-stream flowing underground, through a "subterranean channel" of text, but periodically resurfacing at "bright intervals." Just so does the Irving tribute picture the text-river as intermittently hidden, flowing down, underground, "anon delving into cave-like clefts,—romantic recesses" below the visible surface:

They have spared Irving, his writings, flowing through broad margins of letter press; to what can we compare them, but to a crystal streamlet purling through flowery savannahs and sweet shady groves; and anon delving into cave-like clefts,—romantic recesses, where, of old, the fairies sought shelter from the glare of day.  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 1851

They have spared Irving: his liquid sentences flowing through glittering margins of fairest typography,—to what can we compare them, but to a crystal streamlet purling amid flowery savannas and sweet shady groves; and anon delving into cave-like clefts,—romantic recesses, where, of old, the fairies sought shelter from the glare of day. --Scenes and Adventures in the Army

In Redburn Melville imagines the singer's voice as "a musical brook." In this instance, words are the metaphorical margins of the flowing melody. As in the Irving tribute, the banks of the figurative stream are pictured in alternating shades, and are decorated with flowers.

His voice was just the voice to proceed from a small, silken person like his; it was gentle and liquid, and meandered and tinkled through the words of a song, like a musical brook that winds and wantons by pied and pansied margins. --Redburn

Photo Credit: Saratoga woods and waterways