typing infinity

"There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves." --Moby-Dick (The Mast-Head)

So Ishmael muses from the mast-head, looking down. Arrived at the Continental Divide, the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons looks down from a "lofty bluff" above the South Pass, likewise with ocean and infinity on his mind: 

"A continent is spread beneath me: a new world in ocean-midst: the great ocean, at whose ever-heaving surge — typing infinity — man trembled and forbore many thousand years ...."  --September 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Not only the conceit, but also the grammar is close to Melville's--as evidenced in the hyphenated modifier "ever-heaving." Compounds with the intensifier "ever" occur dozens of times in Melville's Pierre. Dozens, really? Let's count 'em. More than twenty-four, actually, since we ought to count "ever-interrupting and ever-marring world" as two.

1. ever-shifting Nature
2. ever-encroaching appetite for God.
3. ever-sweet interpreter [Nature, again]
4. ever-sacred being
5. ever-interrupting and ever-marring world
6. ever-growing business
7. ever-adaptive sort of motive
8. ever-present self
9. ever-nameless
10. ever-sacred memory
11. ever-primeval wilderness
12. ever-creative fire
13. ever-recurring intervals
14. ever-hospitable grave
15. ever-creeping and condensing haze of ambiguities
16. ever-abiding shadows
17. ever-flowing
18. ever-shifting shadowy vistas
19. ever-welling mystery
20. ever-shipwrecked character
21. ever-increasing admiration
22. ever-elastic regions of evanescent invention
23. ever-devouring and omnivorous melancholy
24. ever-baffled artist

And "ocean-midst" (another compound) recalls Pico as Melville had just described it a late chapter of his new novel.

Mount Pico
José Luís Ávila Silveira/Pedro Noronha e Costa via Wikimedia Commons

"Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time, as the isle-peak, Piko, stands unassaultable in the midst of waves." Pierre, or The Ambiguities (August 1852)

“More isles! more isles!” cried Babbalanja, erect, and gazing abroad. “And lo! round all is heaving that infinite ocean."  --Mardi, and A Voyage Thither