Melvilliana: All I want is a good listener

https://open.substack.com/pub/melvilliana/p/all-i-want-is-a-good-listener?r=n51cr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

 

New essay on Substack, excerpt below...

Inspired by recent encounters with Hawthorne, in particular by their heady and hearty barn-talk that March, Melville might have found a way to get the gist of their stimulating conversations into print. Echoes of Melville’s letters in the opening installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” lead me to suspect it may be haunted by Hawthorne. At any rate, coincidence or no, the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” talks to the reader like Melville talked in letters to Hawthorne. Here’s one example from the first of Melville’s Agatha letters to Hawthorne dated August 13, 1852.24

In this example, wording and structure of the Captain’s pledge to do most of the talking for his singular reader match the “and if / why I” construction in Melville's 1852 letter to Hawthorne (emphasis mine):

“… and if you are absolutely dumb, why I will sometimes answer for you.”

“And if I thought I could do it well as you, why, I should not let you have it.”

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84865/page/n197/mode/2up

Introducing likely topics of conversation, the Captain sounds quite like Melville when promising a good time to his invited guest:

MELVILLE

“Hark— There is some excellent Montado Sherry awaiting you & some most potent Port. We will have mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered toast with story-telling & crack jokes & bottles from morning till night.”
— Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 29 January? 1851; emphasis mine.

CAPTAIN

“We will talk on all subjects, from the shape of a horse-shoe to that of the slipper of the last favorite—say the 'divine Fanny,’ from great battles, or Napier's splendid pictures of such, down to the obscurest point of the squad drill—from buffalo bulls to elfin sprites.”
—Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 185125

These elaborate invites are similarly themed and structured. Each presents an inventory of delightful activities in store for the recipient, each inventory being divided in three main parts. Melville’s three groupings of promised events are separated by three ampersands; the Captain’s by the word from, used thrice. The invitation in each case extends to just one person: Melville to Hawthorne, the Captain to his Imaginary Friend the reader. The plural “We” brings together speaker and singular reader as joint enjoyers of good times ahead, chiefly to be spent in stimulating conversation....

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And you must take it

What "you must take" in both cases is somebody's creative writing: Hawthorne's book of short stories and the narrator's unexpected burst into verse.

HAWTHORNE AND HIS MOSSES

Take these raspberries, and then I will give you some moss."—"Moss!" said I—"Yes, and you must take it to the barn with you, and good-bye to 'Dwight.'"

--The Literary World Volume 7 (August 17, 1850) page 125.

SCENES BEYOND THE WESTERN BORDER 

How dreary must be a great Commodore ,
Alone in the cabin of a seventy-four.

Be not alarmed ! I make a rhyme but once a year ; the idea came in that shape , and you must take it as it comes .

-- Southern Literary Messenger Volume 17 (June 1851) page 372; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia, 1857) page 228.

In wintry mourning draped

The Desert truly is here— Moral and Natural Wastes.— Gray stunted trees in wintry mourning draped with moss. Chill winds wail,— wild beasts howl,— and my heart echoes, 'Far—lone—forgot.'

 

-- March 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army 

Winter pine tree draped in snow. William S. Keller, 1979.
via National Park Service

 

By wintry hills his hermit-mound
       The sheeted snow-drifts drape.... --Monody by Herman Melville

Text as river, again

Housatonic River via Engineering News-Record

Zounds! how did I miss this before? I guess the focus on margins and their multiple meanings last time around kept me from seeing a fine instance of text-as-flowing-river in one of Melville's letters to Hawthorne. Writing in reply to a letter from Hawthorne, Melville compared his friend's recent "long" letter to a flowing river, specifically the Housatonic:

"My dear Hawthorne: This is not a letter, or even a note, but merely a passing word said to you over your garden gate. I thank you for your easy-flowing long letter (received yesterday) which flowed through me, and refreshed all my meadows, as the Housatonic—opposite me—does in reality." --Melville's Correspondence, N-N ed. p199

Living then at Arrowhead, Melville identified himself with his natural surroundings. Melville figures himself as the land, the margin, and Hawthorne's writing as a river that runs through him. Hawthorne's river of a letter metaphorically flows through and revives Melville like the Housatonic flows through and nourishes the actual physical "meadows" of Berkshire. Melville wrote that now lost thing to Hawthorne on Tuesday, July 22, 1851. Less than two months before, the first installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" appeared in the Richmond Southern Literary Messenger, including this thoroughly Melvillean comparison of Washington Irving's writings to a river:

They have spared Irving, his writings, flowing through broad margins of letter press; to what can we compare them, but to a crystal streamlet purling through flowery savannahs and sweet shady groves; and anon delving into cave-like clefts,—romantic recesses, where, of old, the fairies sought shelter from the glare of day.  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 1851

There's more on the passage from "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the earlier Dragooned post on Washington Irving's very fluid text. On the same theme also check out

• Wide margins and pictorial embellishment; and
• More on margins

Exotics in and out of genial soil

 

I. F. — Bah! Better continue your catalogue raisonneé of newspapers. What immense sheet is that?

The Weekly Louisville Journal; an excellent farmer's paper. Prentice has a characteristic quality which now needs a name—better than repartee writer. But, heaven and earth! he is the best abuser too of his time—an exotic in a genial soil." 

--Sept. 1851 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

There he sits, a strange exotic, transplanted from the delectable alcoves of the old manorial mansion, to take root in this niggard soil. No more do the sweet purple airs of the hills round about the green fields of Saddle Meadows come revivingly wafted to his cheek. Like a flower he feels the change; his bloom is gone from his cheek; his cheek is wilted and pale.  --Melivlle's Pierre - 1852

So George Dennison Prentice is really a transplanted Yankee, Connecticut-born but now thriving in the genial southern soil of Kentucky. Interesting that Melville similarly equates "genial" with "southern":

But where was slipped in the entering wedge? Philosophy, knowledge, experience — were those trusty knights of the castle recreant? No, but unknown to them, the enemy stole on the castle's south side, its genial one, where Suspicion, the warder, parleyed. In fine, his too indulgent, too artless and companionable nature betrayed him.
--The Confidence-Man - 1857

But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.  --Melville's 1850 revew-essay Hawthorne and His Mosses

"... this horrid and indecent Right whaling, I say, compared to a spirited hunt for the gentlemanly Cachalot in southern and more genial seas, is as the butchery of white bears upon blank Greenland icebergs to zebra hunting in Caffraria, where the lively quarry bounds before you through leafy glades." --Melville, Mardi  - 1849

One person whom Prentice had abused in print was Herman Melville's older brother Gansevoort. Herman's younger brother Allan told him so in October 1844, as Hershel Parker reports:

The opposition have of course made their attacks upon him [Gansevoort Melville] & some of them are very severe. Prentiss the witty editor of the Louisville Journal was right down upon him.  --Herman Melville: A Biography V1.314

But what ’s the theme? The theme was bent—
Be sure, in no dry argument—
On the Picturesque, what ’tis—its essence,
Fibre and root, bud, efflorescence,
Congenial soil, and where at best....  

--Herman Melville, At the Hostelry

"George D. Prentice was a Connecticut Yankee, by birth, but in his brilliant career he was a Southerner by residence and characteristics. Born in 1802, a graduate of Brown University in 1823, a New England editor until 1830, he began to build the monument of his fame in the latter year at Louisville, Kentucky, where for over thirty years he edited the Louisville Journal, and made it conspicuous for its wit. He wrote some beautiful poetry, but his forte was repartee. The pungency of this prince of paragraphers has never been surpassed. There has never been a journalist who could dash off more felicitous rejoinders than George D. Prentice. A strong Whig, he loved the South and the Union with about equal devotion. The last decade of his life was saddened by the conflict between the North and the South, and also by his own increasing weakness for strong drink. He lives in the admiration of those who remember his sallies of wit, but permanent literature will soon pass him by, forgetful, perhaps, of his very name. Some of his poems, however, are replete with lofty sentiment, elegantly expressed. Mr. Prentice died in 1870."

--Frank Gilbert, American Literature

wonder and admiration

"To be frank (though, perhaps, rather foolish), notwithstanding what I wrote yesterday of these Mosses, I had not then culled them all; but had, nevertheless, been sufficiently sensible of the subtle essence, in them, as to write as I did. To what infinite height of loving wonder and admiration I may yet be borne, when by repeatedly banqueting on these Mosses, I shall have thoroughly incorporated their whole stuff into my being,—that, I can not tell. But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul."

--Herman Melville on "Hawthorne and His Mosses" in the NY Literary World, August 24, 1850. 

 

My Friend [named "Frank" in the original magazine series] and I rode together, and had much wonder and admiration to express upon our night adventure,—our happy fortune to witness so much beauty and sublimity. I remembered then, his omission of "the light of a dark eye in woman," in the only quotation of poetry I had ever heard him make. He said it was introduced with beautiful expression, but all the poet's audacity, to illustrate an Alpine storm. 

--Scenes and Adventures in the Army; "wonder and admiration" added with other revisions to the May 1853 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border in the Southern Literary Messenger.

Regarding the prairie dialogue on eye-color and Byronic mountain storms, see also previous Dragooned posts on blue eyes or dark? and a poet's audacity.

Dollars, damn!

Look how Herman Melville likes to alliterate the "d" in dollars: with damn and Devil; with diplomas; with derived and ditties:

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. --Herman Melville, 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Never mind, sir, never mind, sir; though rogues sometimes be gentlemanly; gentlemen that are gentlemen never go abroad without their diplomas. Their diplomas are their friends; and their only friends are their dollars; you have a purse-full of friends."  --Melville's Pierre, 1852

Now, the dollars derived from his ditties, these Pierre had always invested in cigars; so that the puffs which indirectly brought him his dollars were again returned, but as perfumed puffs; perfumed with the sweet leaf of Havanna.  --Pierre

Compare the examples above to this, the revised book version of the prairie dialogue that originally appeared in the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, without any reference to dollars, dealing, or dens:

Let us have a fling at the world,—the poor dollar-dealing sinners, cooped up in their great dens—" --Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Woo hoo!

Elsewhere in the original magazine version our Captain of U. S. Dragoons has been thinking of dollars--and in connection with writing and publishing, as the following passage shows:

" What is written, may always chance to be printed, if not read: how charming then to the busy denizens of the world, whose very brains have received an artificial mould, to read such incident! Now if I could only introduce the word 'dollar,' — good heavens! it was never heard here before! 

--July 1852, Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Don't think Melville only ever speaks of plural dollars:

 And who will refuse, what Turk or Dyak even, his own little dollar for sweet charity's sake?  --The Confidence-Man

Or that our Captain of U. S. Dragoons only employs the singular dollar:

Imaginary Friend. — You are wandering again. What could have caused that strange circle in the grass there? — it is forty feet across, and, sure enough, it is of the rank sun-flower.

"Why, my friend, if you were imaginative you could people it with the fairies which have been frightened from the continent by the clink of gold, and have here found refuge—pretty far too from the sound of dollars."  -- June 1851 installment and Scenes and Adventures

For further consideration of that passage on dollar-dealers which appears only in the book version, see previous Dragooned posts on

• dollar-dealing sinners as the Duyckincks
• Den Koopman
• Flings at the World

Speaking of dreams . . .

I never could get a handle on this vivid dream sequence which concludes the May 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border. OK, I admit I can't help thinking of Melville's friendship with Hawthorne and that beautiful poem "Monody" when the narrator describes feeling "tortured by a dear friend, who seemed to know me not, or to be estranged."

And then to be estranged in life,
     And neither in the wrong . . .  --Melville's Monody

Beyond that, I'm mystified. Not that there has to be any Melville connection at all, necessarily. I would love to hear any interpretation or explication of the Captain's strange dream. Of course if you detect any verbal or thematic resonance with writings by Melville somewhere, I'd love to hear about that, too.

C. "As I gaze up from this deep vale—now so dark—on that planet so serenely bright, the little opening between rock and leaves, seems but the gateway to a path of ether, never so short and inviting! Methinks I see a pitying smile which reveals the hollow littleness of all our eager struggles."

There are times when the lethargic soul shrinks even from itself; is numb; nothing can excite it; we forget to hope! And with some such speech, or soliloquy, to which I heard no answer, I must have slumbered, and dreamed; but my acts and troubled thoughts were life-like, and of which the stars were certainly no portion: I would not repeat it, but I was tortured by a dear friend, who seemed to know me not, or to be estranged: and there was a spell—as in a nightmare—which always made me powerless to clear up the cause, or exact nature of the calamity. This heart-pain half aroused me; but I scarce knew where I was; there was a sense of something wrong; but my apathy, or a kind of ennui of sleep, was so profound, that I lay wondering whether or not, I still belonged to the world; and so, must have slept again; for then I surely dreamed: a night alarm led me to the door of an ancient castle [1857: A night alarm in an ancient castle led me to the gate]; and though all were then dumb with fear, I knew a flood was coming down far slopes that threatened with death; but beyond, I looked and saw, on a plain which was a lofty mountain top, a vast multitude; the earth's habitants, mingled, I thought, with celestial visitants; for their faces shone; they sat motionless on horses, and wore helmets and bright mail; but Terror was on the multitude, and a baleful and uncertain light shone from their midst. Then, there was a rush downward of strange animals, like elephants and horses; which, I thought, would trample down all that stood in their way: next, the mailed warriors charged, with lances set, upon flying men on foot, who were like no others I ever saw; of red countenances, and strange garments and mien; they too were armed, and resisted, but many were slain; and, as they drew near, the warriors fought too, with each other; and thus was supernatural war brought with awful reality, to the very door, which I struggled to maintain against them all. Suddenly I was in a hall with several of those who had fled on foot, and asked them in the Spanish tongue, who, and whence they were? and was astonished that they knew such language, when they answered, "from Egypt." 

Next, I was conscious of flickering gleams of light, which seemed reflected from cavernous arches, and of rumbling reverberated sounds. I was half awake with awe, which fancy again was softening, when a glare of light—a crash, as from the crags overhead, and a sudden fall of water, recalled me to life, and my aching limbs to motion; and I stood upon my feet in "Ash Hollow." 

--May 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and slightly revised in
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

down on the philosophy of Human Destiny

Look to the right and you will see links to monthly installments of the magazine series Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  Taken together the series forms part two of the 1857 book Scenes and Adventures in the Army.  Many fine previous commentators (Hamilton Gardner, Otis E Young) on the book did not know about earlier printings of the same material in newspapers and magazines including the Southern Literary Messenger.  The late date of the book mostly reflects the difficulties Lt. Colonel Cooke had with getting the thing published.  Seeing the magazine installments month-by-month more precisely and usefully situates the writing, especially the freewheeling prairie dialogues between the narrator and his imaginary friend, in 1851-1853.

Besides all the verbal and thematic correspondences shown relentlessly on this blog, the chronology of publication dates matches up surprisingly well to known milestones and moods of Herman Melville during the same period.

The series begins in June 1851, with the narrator sounding cocky and confident like Melville did, about to wrap up Moby-Dick.  Looking to make a friend of one ideal reader, the "Captain of U. S. Dragoons" even talks like Melville to Hawthorne, promising to do all the work of socializing.  Early on, the chatty survey of books and ideas covers the subjects discussed by Melville and Hawthorne, who named some in his journal entry for August 2, 1851:

“time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters.”  (quoted in Hershel Parker's biography, V2.8)

Or in another view, the early installments of Scenes Beyond the Western Border effectively flesh out "A Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn," the book Melville and Hawthorne reportedly planned after Thoreau, to memorialize their conversations.

The mood shifts in December 1851, as the imaginary friend starts to sound less like idealized Hawthorne and more like Melville's critical friend Evert Duyckinck:

 ... as your old fashioned friend, I feel interested in your surface wanderings; but let your double-refined poetry and romance go 'to the D—.'" (Scenes Beyond the Western Border)

The amazingly self-aware critique of poetry and romance continues for the rest of the series.  References to motherhood and nursing infants occur only after the birth of Melville's son Stanwix in October 1851.  The bizarre and inappropriate if not inexplicable rant on foreign books and international copyright in September 1852 follows Melville's discouraging correspondence in March-April 1852 with Richard Bentley, his London publisher.  Bentley had based his low estimation of Pierre on copyright concerns and lousy sales of previous works.  Copyright provided editorial grist for New York newspapers, as Parker shows in columns that must have caught Melville's attention (Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative 402-7).  The Harpers and New York Times promoted Dickens over American authors while Greeley and the Tribune defended them and promoted international copyright.

In September 1852, the Captain of U. S. Dragoons (ostensibly writing in July 1845) seems oddly, personally immersed in these New York newspaper wars of spring 1852, complaining bitterly about "cockney condescension" abroad and "foreign-fashion loving public taste" at home:

And then the infernal trash—much of it from the stews of Paris and London—utterly undersells us, to the almost total suppression of native labour; and to the robbery too of the best foreign authors, whose works would command a copyright.

So much for the fourth of July,—and a dry one!  (September 1852) 

The March 1853 episode of the grizzly bear cub, presented as a mock tragedy, wittily twists negative reviews of Melville's Pierre.  In August 1853, the concluding number, in dialogue between the narrator and his imaginary friend, (named Frank since August 1852) incorporates key terms deployed by Evert and George Duyckinck in their review of Pierre for the New York Literary World.

OK, I said all that to say this, on the subject of Human Destiny in Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  Now then, the matter of 1843 is concluded in January 1852.  After two months off, the series resumes in April 1852 with a new subject, the matter of the 1845 dragoon expedition to the Rocky Mountains.

Having of necessity dropped the source material in Cooke's 1843 Santa Fe Journal, the writer or ghostwriter confronting new matter of 1845 needed new sources.  He found the first one in
Oregon, Ho!, first printed over the signature of "St George" in the Washington National Intelligencer, July 15, 1845. 

Examining the revisions to Oregon, Ho! in April 1852, we find the writer now cynically regarding the Oregon emigrants as "unconscious workers of National Human Destiny."  Our narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons views westward expansion as a second fall, a comparison that Melville saved for Clarel.

They scorn all royal paper claims to this virgin world of ours! The best diplomatists of us all, they would conquer the land as easily as, — Adam lost Paradise.
(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, April 1852; and  Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

 Whatever happen in the end, 
Be sure 'twill yield to one and all
New confirmation of the fall
Of Adam. Sequel may ensue,
Indeed, whose germs one now may view:
Myriads playing pygmy parts-- 
Debased into equality:
In glut of all material arts
A civic barbarism may be:
Man disennobled--brutalized
By popular science--Atheized 
Into a smatterer " (Clarel 4.21)

The fixation with Human Destiny persists into the June 1852 number--possibly indicating a cluster of 1852 installments, April-May-June, apparently composed and submitted together.  In late January and February 1852, Orville Dewey had repeated his Lowell lectures on the Problem of Human Destiny at the Church of the Messiah in New York City.  Melville wrote a dig at Human Destiny lecturers into book 17 of Pierre, then the Captain of U.S. Dragoons railed at "demagogues and infidels" who wowed crowds with "licentious speculations on human destiny":

C.  "But even science is at fault—philosophy at a discount. The public mind is occupied with the theorism of demagogues and infidels, who, abandoning themselves to licentious speculations on human destiny, attract multitudes of fanatical followers, whose minds they bewilder, and whose morals they debase." (June 1852; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

The celebrated Rev. Orville Dewey, a demagogue and infidel?

What's more, a licentious infidel. Debasing the masses with marketable science or "philosophy at a discount."

Who talks like that?  Melville's Ungar the self-exiled soldier, for one, denouncing "popular science" in the lines from Clarel quoted above.  Also Babbalanja in Mardi, musing on the popularity of theorists.  And Ahab, contemplating the whale's head that has voicelessly witnessed enough to "make an infidel of Abraham."

And Melville as Pierre's biographer who disparages "infidel levities" and "infidel-minded" knaves.

Curiously, another bit from one of Dewey's Manhattan lectures on Human Destiny also made its way into the same June 1852 installment with the denunciation of Human Destiny demagogues.  As reported in the New York Daily Tribune for Thursday, February 5, 1852, Dewey's third NYC lecture at the Church of the Messiah considered laughter as a unique feature of "human organization, regarded in its connection with the formation of character and the development of mind":

Another important element in his training to higher ends is the faculty of laughter.  The animals are not endowed with this power, unless the grinning of monkeys is an exception.  This is not merely an expression of the sense of the ludicrous.  Laughter is the symbol of a contented mind, of a genial fellowship, of a comfortable sense of satisfaction, and tends to unite the scattered elements of society in a common feeling of fraternity.  Its influence on health is not to be overlooked.  An explosion of laughter is an excellent aid to digestion.  Superior to old wine, or old cheese, or other celebrated peptic persuaders.

In the June 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, one of the prairie dialogues makes use of Dewey's theme, as follows:

C.   "....Strange, that laughter, man's lowest attribute, is distinctive; while the smile, which seems borrowed from Heaven, and which can confer rapturous joy, if not happiness, is shared, I think, in a slight degree by brutes."   

(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, Southern Literary Messenger, June 1852); and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Melville took up the same theme in The Confidence-Man, riffing ironically on what Orville Dewey had said in praise of laughter, in those widely beloved Lowell lectures on Human Destiny:

Humor is, in fact, so blessed a thing, that even in the least virtuous product of the human mind, if there can be found but nine good jokes, some philosophers are clement enough to affirm that those nine good jokes should redeem all the wicked thoughts, though plenty as the populace of Sodom. At any rate, this same humor has something, there is no telling what, of beneficence in it, it is such a catholicon and charm—nearly all men agreeing in relishing it, though they may agree in little else—and in its way it undeniably does such a deal of familiar good in the world, that no wonder it is almost a proverb, that a man of humor, a man capable of a good loud laugh—seem how he may in other things—can hardly be a heartless scamp."

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed the other, pointing to the figure of a pale pauper-boy on the deck below, whose pitiableness was touched, as it were, with ludicrousness by a pair of monstrous boots, apparently some mason's discarded ones, cracked with drouth, half eaten by lime, and curled up about the toe like a bassoon. "Look—ha, ha, ha!"

"I see," said the other, with what seemed quiet appreciation, but of a kind expressing an eye to the grotesque, without blindness to what in this case accompanied it, "I see; and the way in which it moves you, Charlie, comes in very apropos to point the proverb I was speaking of. Indeed, had you intended this effect, it could not have been more so. For who that heard that laugh, but would as naturally argue from it a sound heart as sound lungs? True, it is said that a man may smile, and smile, and smile, and be a villain; but it is not said that a man may laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and be one, is it, Charlie?"

"Ha, ha, ha!—no no, no no."

punctilios

"I was riding near the head of the column, over the bare prairie, when suddenly, within twenty yards, up sprang a grizzly bear!  He ran about eighty paces, threw himself about, and stood some moments, gazing at us with his head high raised.  "Grizzly bear!" was shouted down the column, and gave an impulse to the true hunters, which strongly tested the punctilios of discipline: a half dozen of us spurred to instant pursuit: away we galloped, toward the mountain, at greater than buffalo speed."  (Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1852)

First known letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne (29 January? 1851):

"Another thing, Mr Hawthorne—Do not think you are coming to any prim nonsensical house—that is nonsensical in the ordinary way.  You wont be much bored with punctilios."(Correspondence, 176)

February 1855:

 "True, he stood upon no punctilios with his jailers..."  (Israel Potter)

Another instance in 1855, this from "Benito Cereno":

As during the telling of the story, Captain Delano had once or twice started at the occasional cymballing of the hatchet-polishers, wondering why such an interruption should be allowed, especially in that part of the ship, and in the ears of an invalid; and, moreover, as the hatchets had anything but an attractive look, and the handlers of them still less so, it was, therefore, to tell the truth, not without some lurking reluctance, or even shrinking, it may be, that Captain Delano, with apparent complaisance, acquiesced in his host's invitation. The more so, since with an untimely caprice of punctilio, rendered distressing by his cadaverous aspect, Don Benito, with Castilian bows, solemnly insisted upon his guest's preceding him up the ladder leading to the elevation; where, one on each side of the last step, sat four armorial supporters and sentries, two of the ominous file. Gingerly enough stepped good Captain Delano between them, and in the instant of leaving them behind, like one running the gauntlet, he felt an apprehensive twitch in the calves of his legs.  (Benito Cereno)