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

I have alluded to

Lucy, this note may seem mysterious; but if it shall, I did not mean to make it so; nor do I know that I could have helped it. But the only reason is this, Lucy: the matter which I have alluded to, is of such a nature, that, for the present I stand virtually pledged not to disclose it to any person but those more directly involved in it.
--Herman Melville, Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (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....
--Scenes Beyond the Western Border (March 1853); and Scenes and Adventures in the Army.

Sketches of the Great West in The Washington Union

Newspapers.com now has The Washington Union (October 6, 1845) with "Sketches of the West" by Philip St. George Cooke. Many passages from Cooke's published "Sketches" were later revised and incorporated in the 1851-1853 magazine series "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," which in turn became Part II of the 1857 book, Scenes and Adventures in the Army.

Found on Newspapers.com

The text is already transcribed on the Dragooned page for Sketches of the Great West.

Recruits wanted for the Dragoons

Found on Newspapers.com

aught save

 

No glimpse of aught, save trees and flowers. -- Mardi: And a Voyage Thither

I was joined, after our frugal supper of dried meat, at the watch-fire of the bivouac, by my friend Frank, who came, I suppose, to while a dull hour; but to give him his due, he brought up some coffee, and we made in tin cups refreshing and strong sleep-dispelling draughts.

"Heaven knows," he said, "why guards should watch in this valley of desolation, with world-forbidding battlements; we might sleep a month, safe from aught save grizzly bears." --September 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border and Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 378

Genesis 6:2,4 on the prairie

Image Courtesy of the Digital Image Archive, Pitts Theology Library
Candler School of Theology, Emory University

"That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose."  --Genesis 6:2

Allusions to Genesis 6:2 and 4 occur in consecutive installments of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border." Both references take the biblical "sons of God" to mean "angels":

July 1852:

Ay de Mi! Our life is a sad struggle;—our material nature with its base cravings,—its cares for animal comforts, and all the ills of the flesh, preys upon and tethers the soul, which yearns for the Beautiful, the Noble, the Exalted;—essays to soar in that sphere, whose types are the bright stars of Heaven! Or, clings to that electric chain of Love which binds humanity—and in the olden Time drew down angels!--Southern Literary Messenger 18 (July 1852): 413; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army.

August 1852:

Come, O, sleep! thou luxury to the happiest; thou matchless blessing to those that may not be comforted. Come deathlike; profound as Adam's first. Oh! fated Progenitor! Then from near thy soft heart, sprang its resistless enemy, evermore armed against the peace of thy unhappy sons! Nay, the very Angels surrendered Heaven, and trembling, yielded to her arms.--Southern Literary Messenger 18 (August 1852): 506; and (slightly revised) Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Herman Melville's seventh novel Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities was first published in late July 1852--in between the July and August installments of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," quoted above.

Did not the angelical Lotharios come down to earth, that they might taste of mortal woman's Love and Beauty? even while her own silly brothers were pining after the self-same Paradise they left? Yes, those envying angels did come down; did emigrate; and who emigrates except to be better off?  --Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities

 More allusions to Genesis 6:2, 4 in Melville's writings:

All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. --Mardi: And a Voyage Thither

"... according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.  --Moby-Dick, or, The Whale

But still the Venus is of the earth, and the Apollo is divine. Should a match be made between them, the union would be like that of the sons of God with the daughters of men.  --Statues in Rome, reconstructed lecture

"This evanescence is the charm!
And most it wins the spirits that be
Celestial, Sir. It comes to me
It was this fleeting charm in show
That lured the sons of God below,
Tired out with perpetuity
Of heaven's own seventh heaven aglow;
Not Eve's fair daughters, Sir; nay, nay
Less fugitive in charm are they:
It was the rose."  --Herman Melville, The Rose Farmer

scribblers getting defensive

They anticipate attack in conversation with a real or imagined critic:

"But some of us scribblers, My Dear Sir, always have a certain something unmanageable in us, that bids us to do this or that, and be done it must—hit or miss.” --Herman Melville, Letter to Richard Bentley, June 5 1849; page 132 in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's Correspondence

Image Credit: British Library

But here comes Frank again: well, rest is evidently not a time for dull narrative.

F. "Most industrious of scribblers, I give you good evening!"  --August 1852 - Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and  Scenes and Adventures in the Army

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.--March 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border ["scribbling" deleted in revision of this dialogue for the 1857 book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army]

C.—   "... I scribble by no rule, and with no object but pastime; and, to compare in some future day the old with the new tone of mind."--August 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army