pleasantly and gently

via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

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

Related post:

• summer carpet of green

tale of the x-ray specs, plundered from Emory's Notes of a Military Reconnaissance

Narrating the homeward bound journey of U. S. Dragoons from the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains in 1845, Philip St George Cooke (or his ghostwriter) relates a comical incident supposed to have occurred while visiting a friendly tribe of Cheyenne people in July 1845.  From the entry for July 16th [1845], originally published in the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border":

     But whilst engaged in the formalities of the council and distribution of presents, we were startled by shouts and laughter so vociferous and continued as to excite great curiosity, and induce some of us to retire to satisfy it:  a merry and comical confusion reigned without; very infectious, but difficult to understand:  it seems that while the young squaws were so gently engaged at their painting, a certain bachelor captain, whose countenance at home is considered quite mild and engaging, but whose wont is now to give of it but an uncertain view through a vast bunch of reddish hair, had the curiosity to take a closer view—he is near-sighted—of the colored design;—possibly he was artlessly examining a natural model;—a matter of highly civilized precedent and practicability:—be this as it may, the belle sauvage of intent and downcast eyes, suddenly raising them, was startled by this hairy apparition hanging over her shoulder; so much so as to indulge in a shrill succession of those shrieks so successfully practised by unfortunate heroines of the boards, and natural, of course, to very young or pretty ladies:  attributing it to his uncouth looks, for, according to his experience, no imaginable offence had been given, the captain's confusion was natural and complete; and so too was the astonishment of many, when this lady-like screaming was repeated by one and another,—all the young girls toward whom the hapless and blushing captain directed his appealing regards. They ran, shouted, hid, laughed; his own puzzled and innocent laughter was the most ridiculous; for an explanation soon began to be whispered about, which did not much abate the merriment. The captain wore spectacles; and we learned that these girls, lamentably ignorant of optics—as of science generally—were full believers in a little theory of their own, upon the subject of the mysterious glasses; and it was no less than that they enabled the fortunate spectator to penetrate opaque bodies; and consequently—although unusually well and completely dressed—they supposed that, to his eyes, their modest garments were no protection!

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," May 1853; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 397-398)

Nothing like the excitement of screaming girls and blushing bachelor is reported in the accounts of other participants in the expedition.  Engineer William B. Franklin relates:

"We had a talk and a smoke with them, made them a few presents, and in about half an hour, left them perfectly delighted with us."  (March to South Pass)

Captain Henry S. Turner dutifully reports the council meeting, giving a detailed account of Colonel Kearny's speech and the distribution of presents, but says nothing about the external commotion.

Cooke's story in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border"  is an elaborate retelling of an incident that actually happened in the following year, 1846, on the march of U. S. dragoons under S. W. Kearny to New Mexico and California.   The affair of the see-through spectacles took place among the Maricopas of southern Arizona, as first reported by Lieutenant W. H. Emory in Notes of a Military Reconnaissance (1848):

November 13 and 14.—With the morning came the Maricopas women, dressed like the Pimos. They are somewhat taller, and one peculiarity struck me forcibly, that while the men had aquiline noses, those of the women were retroussés.  Finding the trade in meal had ceased, they collected in squads about the different fires, and made the air ring with their jokes and merry peals of laughter. Mr. Bestor's spectacles were a great source of merriment. Some of them formed the idea that with their aid, he could see through their cotton blankets. They would shrink and hide behind each other at his approach. At length, I placed the spectacles on the nose of an old woman, who became acquainted with their use and explained it to the others.
(Emory's Notes)

"Mr. Bestor" is the civilian statistician Norman Bestor, who according to Richard G. Beidleman was "responsible for specimen collecting and sketching" while serving as Emory's "naturalist aide."  Speaking of Bestor, Beidleman can't help but mention the spicy anecdote of the specs from Emory's Notes:

"Bestor proved his worth, having wisely carried the chronometers separately in a basket on his arm.  Later he would also prove to be a source of amazement to southwestern Indians because of his spectacles."  (California's Frontier Naturalists)