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

high pressure engines

J. C. Hoadley Portable Steam Engine
Vintage Machinery / Photo: Glenn Duspiva

We have been all day on the verges of these perennial showers, which the cold, cloud, attracting and condensing mountain tops send forth from their basis as ceaseless streams through the far plains. Thus nature, as with a low pressure engine, carries on its vast schemes; the surplus steam from the hot valleys giving motion to its rivers.
--Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1853

Revised and corrected in the 1857 book Scenes and Adventures in the Army. Note the change from low to high pressure:

We have been all day on the verges of these perennial showers, which the cold cloud-attracting and condensing mountain-tops send forth from their bases, as ceaseless streams through the far plains. Thus Nature, as with a high-pressure engine, carries on its vast scheme; the surplus steam from the hot valleys giving motion to its rivers.

Herman Melville:

His story told, the wooden-legged man threw back his head, and gave vent to a long, gasping, rasping sort of taunting cry, intolerable as that of a high-pressure engine jeering off steam; and that done, with apparent satisfaction hobbled away. --The Confidence-Man

Herman Melville's sister Catherine (Kate) married John Chipman Hoadley on September 15, 1853. Hoadley had been active in Pittsfield since 1848; in partnership with Gordon McKay he operated a machine shop and foundry with "an extensive reputation for steam engines" (Springfield Republican, 22 January 1852).

McKay and Hoadley sold their Pittsfield shop in February 1852 and relocated to Lawrence, Massachusetts.