muttering thunder

Here we make our camp: the sun shines out brightly, but muttering thunders marshall forth black clouds.... May 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (with "marshall" corrected to "marshal": "muttering thunders marshal forth black clouds.")

“Hark! The thunder becomes less muttering. It is nearing us, and nearing the earth, too. Hark! One crammed crash! All the vibrations made one by nearness. Another flash. Hold!”  --The Lightning-Rod Man in Putnam's Monthly Magazine 4 (August 1854) and The Piazza Tales.

Who uses "who lives" to start sentences of dramatic dialogue by fictive philosophers?

Babbalanja:

And who lives that blasphemes? --Mardi: And a Voyage Thither

The narrator of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (the 1851-1853 magazine series, reprinted with later revisions as Part II of Scenes and Adventures in the Army):

But who lives, who may not be wounded through another! --August 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Apemantus:

... Who lives, that's not
Depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears
Not one spurn to their graves of their friends' gift?   --Timon of Athens, Act 1 Scene 2

Who lives that’s not depravèd or depraves?
Who dies that bears not one spurn to their graves

Reading Bruyère on the mortal limits of friendship, Herman Melville remembered what Apemantus says in the first act of Timon and paraphrased in the margin:

"True, Shakespeare goes further. None die but somebody spurns them into the grave."
--quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 2, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), page 502.

True or false, friendship in the material world ends with death and burial. Bruyère's theme of temporal, conditional friendship, amplified by Shakespeare according to Melville, gets remarkably close to the essence of the narrator's lament in the August 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border." The narrating "Captain of U. S. Dragoons" continues in the Timon vein normally employed by Frank, his cynical traveling companion:

I dare say, nay, I am sure, that beyond some family ties, there is not upon the wide earth a heart in sympathy with our good or ill; whose even beat would be as much disturbed, were this wild sod to cover us forever, as the most ephemeral of the trifling cares which make up their petty lives."

Eventually our Captain recovers his romantic self, however. Ready to embrace Illusion over intolerable Truth, exemplifying the "heroism" of "blind credulity," he eloquently urges belief in

"a pure soul love, — a deathless friendship, which all life's trials and worldly baseness cannot soil or sap."

Unsupplied

Table of Contents - Scenes and Adventures in the Army

 CHAPTER XVIII.

Romantic Cheyenne Village — Adventures There  — Our Few Wants Unsupplied in the Wilderness — March Without Water....  --Contents, part 2 chapter 18 of Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857).

The word unsupplied occurs once in Redburn, once in Israel Potter; and thrice in Moby-Dick:

The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis.--Chapter 87, The Grand Armada

But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody—except those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen—to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.  --Chapter 100, Leg and Arm

What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? --Chapter 68, The Blanket

the music changed

Instantly the music changed....  --Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities (1852)

Southern Literary Messenger - May 1853

But soon, the music changed; and, stranger then and there, to a sweet waltz!  --May 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (with "sweet waltz" revised to "joyous air").

Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857) - page 409

Welcome then

And welcome then, the rapids and the final plunge!  --July 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Welcome then be Ugliness and Poverty and Infamy, and all ye other crafty ministers of Truth....  --Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities (first published in July 1852).

Life is little better than sleep

... life is little else than an often interrupted and luxurious nap. --Typee

And why not tell my dream?—Life is little better; nay, it is little different.  --March 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army.

Deleting "as of a"; adding direful and Titanic

Suddenly, with  a crash, as of a mountain of rock torn asunder....  --May 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

Revisions to the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the Southern Literary Messenger include deletion of the simile introduced with the expression, "as of a...." Cutting "as of a" transforms the metaphorical "mountain of rock" into literal "rocks," vividly re-figured after revision as "Titanic."

But suddenly, with a direful crash amid the Titanic rocks....  --Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Also added in revision, along with "Titanic": the adjective "direful" that describes the "crash" which has been made a more immediate and literal, less metaphorical sound, by deleting "as of a." Deleted or added, the verbal elements of this fascinating revision site are all exampled in Herman Melville's writing. The words direful and Titanic feature with particular significance in Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852), respectively.

AS OF A

And now, loud above the roar of the sea, was suddenly heard a sharp, splintering sound, as of a Norway woodman felling a pine in the forest.  --Mardi: And A Voyage Thither

Touched by the breath of the bereaved Aurora, every sunrise that statue gave forth a mournful broken sound, as of a harp-string suddenly sundered, being too harshly wound.  --Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

DIREFUL
The word direful occurs 10x in Moby-Dick; or The Whale for example:

white curds of the whale's direful wrath --Moby Dick

Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; --The Town-Ho's Story

That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness.--Ahab's Leg

and once in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities:

 not entirely untempered to human nature are the most direful blasts of Fate. 

TITANIC
4x in Pierre; or The Ambiguities

a fearful pile of Titanic bricks 

 this Inferno of his Titanic vision.

the mountain once called Delectable, but now styled Titanic.

But now at last since the very blood in his body had in vain rebelled against his Titanic soul;

Such was the wild scenery—the Mount of Titans,

Related post:

• Memnon and Mount Pike

something in the idea of

"There is something in the idea of grandeur with which these high plains inspire me, that I cannot fully understand."  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border - August 1852; deleted in revision, not in the book version of this passage as published in Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857), page 361.

"... yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood."  --Moby-Dick chapter 42, The Whiteness of the Whale.

"WHALES—a word, which, in the popular sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness."  --Moby-Dick chapter 32, Cetology

In revision of the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, "I cannot fully understand" at the end of a sentence:

"There is something in the idea of grandeur with which these high plains inspire me, that I cannot fully understand."

Scenes Beyond the Western Border - August 1852

 was changed to "I cannot tell why..." at the start of a new sentence:

"I cannot tell why,—but even with the snow-peaks in view, it seemed the summit of the earth."

Scenes and Adventures in the Army - page 361

"Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly...."
--Moby-Dick, Loomings

Compare too (while we're at it) this part, deleted in revision:

the idea of grandeur with which these high plains inspire me

with a similar collocation in Moby-Dick of abstract noun (here horror; there grandeur) plus "with which" plus "inspire":

the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of the herd

Busted again, right?

Why so dull?

"Why so dull?" --Babbalanja in Melville's Mardi: And a Voyage Thither

"Ah, why so dull?" --I. F. [Imaginary Friend] in the September 1851 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

More accusations of dullness, in dialogue:

"How very dull you are."  --deleted in revision of Melville's The Lightning-Rod Man (appears in Putnam's magazine but not The Piazza Tales.

I. F. "Talk of dullness! and you are half asleep, and have just made a pun that is malicious premeditated dullness."  --September 1851 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Something of the sort

The highlighted line by C. in this prairie dialogue from the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border was deleted in revision and does not appear in the 1857 book version.

F. "Is it not the impression of massiveness, which the extent of the level shape adds to the effect of height?

C. "Something of the sort:—perhaps so.... 
--August 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

 "Something of the sort" in the 1852 version was changed to "There may be something in that."

 PIERRE - 1852

• Already Pierre had anticipated something of this sort;

• I believe I was dreaming—sleep-walking, or something of that sort.

CORRESPONDENCE - May 1851

•  "So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort"

MOBY-DICK - 1851

• I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind.”

• ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed....

• “Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that sort; 

• his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort....

MARDI - 1849

... Traitor, I'll stand by this to the last gasp, you are inebriated, Babbalanja."

"Perhaps so, my lord; but I was treating of the imagination, may it please you."

"It seems to have been added for a postscript," rejoined Braid-Beard, screwing his eyes again.

"Perhaps so," said Babbalanja, "but some wag must have done it."

Nerves, strong coffee

Old subjects but perhaps worth another look--especially in view of deletions in the book version...



 March 1853-Scenes Beyond the Western Border:

But now, "the morn is up again,"—and we have marched many miles fasting, and have been attracted through a turbid river by the sight of grass, and have stopped for breakfast under some cotton woods,—and in their shade I am scribbling with a pencil—

F.—"Yes, and fine work you are making of it! The day should commence with the morning, and the brighter the better; not with the nightmare of a sleeper, who should have watched."

C.—"Perhaps a nervous fit—from your strong coffee?"

Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage

... the fact was, his nerves could not stand it; in the course of his courtly career, he had drunk too much strong Mocha coffee and gunpowder tea, and had smoked altogether too many Havannas.

White-Jacket chapter 83 A Man-of-War College

... owing to his partiality for strong coffee, he was apt to be nervous when we fired salutes....

March 1853-Scenes Beyond the Western Border:

F.—"Now, listen to the song of that bird; it will soothe your nerves."

C.—"Nerves! It is medicine to the mind!—it comes like a message of love!"

The book version of this invented prairie dialogue drops all reference to nerves and coffee.

July 7th.—But now, "the morn is up again," and we have marched many miles fasting, and have been attracted over the turbid river by the sight of grass, and have stopped and breakfasted under some cotton-woods; and in their shade my pipe and pencil are struggling for exclusive attention;—but pipe has it!—for here comes my sympathetic companion of the night, looking as discontented as if he had not been luxuriously talked to sleep.

"What's the matter?"

Friend.—O, confound the bivouac! the dew or frost has got into my joints.

"Delicate, indeed!"

Friend.—I believe this the very Valley of Acheron! in fact I had bad dreams,—of midnight incantations,— infernal revels.

"Pshaw! it was a calm and beautiful night; and never shone the stars through purer air, into the dark mountain vale. Listen to that sweet bird! it is piping now of some dream of love."  --Scenes and Adventures in the Army

  Herman Melville, 1849 journal entry:

I impute the nightmare to a cup of prodigiously strong coffee...

 Herman Melville, Letter to Catherine Gansevoort Lansing (12 August 1878):

After two prodigious bumpers of coffee at the depot (from the effect of which I have hardly yet recovered)...

Echoes

HERMAN MELVILLE'S PIERRE (first published at the end of July 1852):

Not his refined, courtly, loving, equable mother, Pierre felt, could unreservedly, and like a heaven's heroine, meet the shock of his extraordinary emergency, and applaud, to his heart's echo, a sublime resolve, whose execution should call down the astonishment and the jeers of the world.

"... does not that involve for thee unending misery? And my truthful soul would echo—Unending misery!"  --Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities

 MARCH 1853 - SCENES BEYOND THE WESTERN BORDER, reprinted in Part II of Scenes and Adventures in the Army (subtitle: "Romance of Military Life"; working title: "Fragments of a Military Life"):

Southern Literary Messenger - March 1853

"... Chill winds wail,—wild beasts howl,—and my heart echoes, 'Far—lone—forgot.'"
--Scenes Beyond the Western Border

 ***

 Oh, Yillah, Yillah! All the woods repeat the sound, the wild, wild woods of my wild soul. Yillah! Yillah! cry the small strange voices in me, and evermore, and far and deep, they echo on. --Mardi: And a Voyage Thither - Volume 1

 "Amen! amen! amen!" cried echoes echoing echoes.  --Mardi: And a Voyage Thither - Volume 2

Memnon and Mount Pike

Revisions to the May 1853 episode of Scenes Beyond the Western Border included deletion of the simile comparing a loud "crash" of thunder to the sound of splitting rock. The deleted figure begins with the formula, "as of a..."; thus:

".. as of a mountain of rock torn asunder."

Southern Literary Messenger - May 1853

In Pierre (1852) Melville poetically describes the Egyptian monument to Memnon that in ancient times made a musical sound when first struck by sunlight every morning. Melville's Memnon passage includes a close parallel to the deleted simile in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border." Using the same "as of a..." formula, Melville in Pierre compares the sound once emitted from the stone monument to the sound of a breaking harp-string:

Touched by the breath of the bereaved Aurora, every sunrise that statue gave forth a mournful broken sound, as of a harp-string suddenly sundered, being too harshly wound. --Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities

 Both similes begin with as + of + a; both employ a form of sunder:

as of a harp-string suddenly sundered (Pierre)

as of a mountain of rock torn asunder (Scenes Beyond the Western Border)

The example from "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" does not appear in the 1857 book version.

MAY 1853

The storm which had followed the higher range, was now in our front; sporting as with fierce joy, amid the mountain tops. Suddenly, with a crash, as of a mountain of rock torn asunder, lightning revealed through a vista of black and magnificently wild array of clouds, Mount Pike,—splendent with the glare, but simple, serene, sublime amid the chaos of elemental war. Like a fata morgana, turned to stone. --May 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

1857

But the storm which had followed the higher range, now came sweeping on, sporting as with fierce joy amid the mountain tops; and here, and there, and far, the spectral peaks seemed rising to the capricious gleams, and many-voiced Echo swelled the glorious diapason. Sport and music of the Gods!—O! it was joy unspeakable, to stand thus on the very throne of the storm, whilst its fierce wings hurtled the mountains around,—and the wanton thunderbolts made the elements to tremble! But suddenly, with a direful crash amid the Titanic rocks, there came a wondrous glare, that revealed through a vista of the black array of clouds, Mount Pike, splendent, sublime, serene, amid the chaotic war!—like a Fata Morgana, turned to stone. --Scenes and Adventures in the Army

 Also deleted: the adjective elemental, lost in revision of "chaos of elemental war" to "chaotic war."

The deleted idea of warfare among the elements occurs also in Melville's Pierre, with reference to the Fountain of Enceladus. Melville figures it as "elemental rivalry," in this instance between water and volcanic fire. In the Enceladus Grove at the Palace of Versailles, the water spouting from the mouth of the fallen Titan figuratively battles the fire that Enceladus supposedly breathed, being buried under Mount Etna. Melville in Pierre is comparing a local rock formation dubbed "Enceladus" to Gaspard Marsy's Versailles sculpture of Enceladus,

"from whose still twisted mouth for sixty feet the waters yet upgush, in elemental rivalry with those Etna flames, of old asserted to be the malicious breath of the borne-down giant...." --Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities

Related post:

• Deleting as of a

retain what? temperature, youth, loftiness, spotlessness, softness

http://claretscience3.wikispaces.com/TOUCH

Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. --Moby-Dick, The Blanket (1851) 

One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts. Moby-Dick, The Grand Armada

In the example above from the Grand Armada chapter of Moby-Dick, comparison with Melville's source shows definitely that retain is Melville's word--one of his own contributions, added during creative revision of the borrowed passage in Frederick Debell Bennett's A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe (Volume 2, pages 167-8), along with vivid figures also not Bennett's: the "reticule"; "Tartar's bow"; and "baby's ears."

When the substance is gone, men cling to the shadow. Places once set apart to lofty purposes, still retain the name of that loftiness, even when converted to the meanest uses. It would seem, as if forced by imperative Fate to renounce the reality of the romantic and lofty, the people of the present would fain make a compromise by retaining some purely imaginative remainder....--Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852)

"... it was a marvel how, under such circumstances, these hands retained their spotlessness."  --The Confidence-Man

For ye who green or gray retain
Childhood's illusion, or but feign;
As bride and suite let pass a bier—
So pass the coming canto here.  --Clarel Part 2 Canto 35, Prelusive

From the August 1853 installment of Scenes Beyond The Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army:

Scenes Beyond the Western Border
Southern Literary Messenger 19 - August 1853

C.—"Well, well,—I wrote what pleased myself; and,—another object I have, which I did not mention: with scarce a book to read, if one did not write, I fancy the beef and pork and beans would in time form a coating round his brain,—turn it all perhaps to thick and solid skull! How is it with you, Frank? Does yours retain a slight softness?"

From Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, Volume 2 (Babbalanja Falleth Upon Pimminee Tooth And Nail):

For these Tapparians have no brains. In lieu, they carry in one corner of their craniums, a drop or two of attar of roses; charily used, the supply being small. They are the victims of two incurable maladies: stone in the heart, and ossification of the head.

1857 Utah expedition

"I have one hundred and forty-four horses, and have lost one hundred and thirty-four. Most of the loss has occurred much this side of South Pass, in comparatively moderate weather. It has been of starvation. The earth has a no more lifeless, treeless, grassless desert; it contains scarcely a wolf to glut itself on the hundreds of dead and frozen animals which for thirty miles nearly block the road with abandoned and shattered property, they mark, perhaps, beyond example in history, the steps of an advancing army with the horrors of a disastrous retreat." --Philip St. George Cooke

The report by Philip St. George Cooke of his 1857 march in brutal winter conditions from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to Fort Bridger, Wyoming is available in a Congressional publication of 1858 (Thirty-fifth Congress, first session, House of Representatives, Ex. Doc. No. 71) titled The Utah expedition.



Cooke's gritty narrative also circulated widely in contemporary newspapers. The New York Times (January 29, 1858), published the entire account, aptly described in another column as "terse and graphic." On February 4, 1858 the Pittsfield Sun gave extensive quotes from Cooke's report in an article reprinted from the Boston Post under the heading, "Col. Cook's March to Join the Utah Army." Elsewhere headlines read "Terrible Sufferings."

Pittsfield Sun - February 4, 1858