Canes, laid on palm trunks, formed the floor. How elastic! In
vogue all over Odo, among the chiefs, it imparted such a buoyancy to
the person, that to this special cause may be imputed in good part the
famous fine spirits of the nobles.
Hypochondriac! essay the elastic
flooring! It shall so pleasantly and gently jolt thee, as to shake up,
and pack off the stagnant humors mantling thy pool-like soul. Such was
my dwelling.... --Mardi - Taji Retires from the World
In the July 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" the collocation of
gently with
pleasantly occurs also in the context of a domestic retreat from "the world."
Whom then shall I address? — the mock sentimentalist? and begin the day: "Our slumbers this morning were gently and pleasantly dissolved by the cheerful martins, which sang a sweet reveille with the first blush of Aurora, at our uncurtained couches."
-- Scenes Beyond the Western Border, July 1852 ; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army, page 332.
Melville's Taji "retires from the world" as announced in heading to chapter 62 in the first volume of
Mardi. The Captain of U. S. Dragoons decides (after self-consciously experimenting with contrastive narrative modes, romantic or "sentimentalist" vs. politician, bureaucrat or "statist") that he would prefer a "friendly" reader in a "poetic mood" over "the shallow or hurried worldling." The sentence expressing this determination also appears without comment as sole epigraph to the 1857 book version:
"I address not then, the shallow or hurried worldling; but the friendly one, who in the calm intervals from worldly cares, grants me the aid of a quiet and thoughtful,—and if it may be,—a poetic mood." --July 1852 - Scenes Beyond the Western Border; epigraph in Scenes and Adventures in the Army.
Also worth a closer look: the narrator's enthusiasm in
Mardi for bouncy flooring in the homes of islanders has an interesting parallel in the May 1853 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border. The contexts are similarly domestic, the representations intensely romantic. As Taji extolled the virtues of cane floors, in repeated exclamations, so the dragoon-narrator praises the advantages of Cheyenne lodgings:
How enviable is the Chian! Such is his simple, clean, comfortable house; so cheap, so moveable! When his summer carpet—of green velvet—wears out, how easy to move to another; to select some still pleasanter spring or valley, and enjoy the change of scene and air; free of the curses and the cares entailed by civilization. -- May 1853 - Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army
In
Pierre (1852) Melville uses the expression "summer carpet of green" when satirizing romanticized views of poverty:
Go to! God hath deposited cash in the Bank subject to our gentlemanly order; he hath bounteously blessed the world with a summer carpet of green. Begone, Heraclitus! The lamentations of the rain are but to make us our rainbows! --Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities
And another thing, speaking of similar ways of praising domestic comforts in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" and known writings by Herman Melville. The use of
enviable by the dragoon-narrator to describe "the Chian" in his "clean, comfortable," inexpensive and portable home recalls Melville's use of the same adjective in praise of
" those enviable little tents or pulpits, called
crow's-nests, in which the lookouts of a Greenland whaler
are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas."
--Moby-Dick, chapter 35 - The Mast-Head
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