Zounds! how did I miss this before? I guess the focus on margins and their multiple meanings last time around kept me from seeing a fine instance of text-as-flowing-river in one of Melville's letters to Hawthorne. Writing in reply to a letter from Hawthorne, Melville compared his friend's recent "long" letter to a flowing river, specifically the Housatonic:
"My dear Hawthorne: This is not a letter, or even a note, but merely a passing word said to you over your garden gate. I thank you for your easy-flowing long letter (received yesterday) which flowed through me, and refreshed all my meadows, as the Housatonic—opposite me—does in reality." --Melville's Correspondence, N-N ed. p199
Living then at Arrowhead, Melville identified himself with his natural surroundings. Melville figures himself as the land, the margin, and Hawthorne's writing as a river that runs through him. Hawthorne's river of a letter metaphorically flows through and revives Melville like the Housatonic flows through and nourishes the actual physical "meadows" of Berkshire. Melville wrote that now lost thing to Hawthorne on Tuesday, July 22, 1851. Less than two months before, the first installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" appeared in the Richmond
Southern Literary Messenger, including this thoroughly Melvillean comparison of Washington Irving's writings to a river:
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
There's more on the passage from "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the earlier Dragooned post on
Washington Irving's very fluid text. On the same theme also check out
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