amigo mio

Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker on the break between Herman Melville and Evert Duyckinck in early 1852: 

"Only a dramatic personal confrontation just at this time, a meeting in which Duyckinck told Melville that he could not recommend the work to any publisher, seems adequate to account for the anger Melville displayed toward his friend in what he inserted into his manuscript a week or so into January."

"... Duyckinck's blunt condemnation of Pierre is the most likely cause of Melville's apparent decision not even to try to find another publisher for his manuscript."
(Reading Melville's Pierre 147)

C.  "Amigo Mio!  Didn't you desert me on the eve of a snow storm, like many another friend of so honest mouthing!  And is a touch of poetry a bad companion in difficulty and trial?  Never a bit; it was the boon of a God — Wisdom was ever feminine."

I. F.  "Phew!  The fit is on!  Sorry I said a word!   (April 1852)

"I. F." stands for "Imaginary Friend," later in this same installment also called "friend critic."   Just now the Captain is feeling abandoned, deserted again by a friend

"on the eve of a snowstorm." 

the moral of the story

"Beyond any doubt Duyckinck considered Pierre immoral:  we know that from the review he later wrote of the expanded version that the Harpers published."
Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Reading Melville's Pierre, 147

"The most immoral moral of the story, if it has any moral at all, seems to be the impracticability of virtue..."
(Review of Melville's Pierre in Duyckincks' Literary World, August 21, 1852)

 My tragedy is all true,—and if not quite serious, has, as is proper, its moral;—but rather, as I have alluded to the primitive tragedy, let that " future reader" here imagine the entry of Chorus, and their song to Freedom! That dumb beasts prefer death to slavery! Liberty lost, they can die without the excitement of the world's applause, or hopes of a grateful posterity! (It is not possible, I think, that the cub could have known that I would immortalize him.)
("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," March 1853)

Below, the whole mockudrama as it originally appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger for March 1853.  This installment begins with a new and unique feature, a subheading with synopses of major episodes in italics.  The subheading shows that with the series winding down, the writer is getting ready to make a book of it, experimenting with italicized synopses for the table of contents.  The tale of the captured grizzly cub burlesques Greek tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet, while at the same time—as shown here—mimicking the vocabulary used in the hurtful review of Pierre in the New York Herald (September 18, 1852).  In the 1853 subheading, this incredible episode is titled:   Cub, a tragedy in three acts; same title appears in the table of contents for the 1857 book version, only with initial capital letters and without the italics:  Cub, a Tragedy in Three Acts.

Cub, a tragedy in three acts
March 1853

So there is a moral, after all.  And YOW what a moral!