Picturing mother with baby, January 1852 (Stanwix Melville born October 22, 1851)

Madonna of the Pinks
Raphael, c. 1506-7 via Wikimedia Commons

"Incomprehensible scheme! Oh! thou beautiful and wonderful Nature!—mother and moulder of the forms, and minds as well, of our wayward race. Now, she smiles in brilliant moonbeams on the grassy meadows, which wave with answering gladness to the whispering air. And the strong river flows as gently as an infant playing on the young mother's breast;—its murmurs as softly musical as that infant's voice!"

--January 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

 When the above was published, Philip St. George Cooke (1809-1895) was 42 years old. Ages of his four children with wife Rachel Wilt Hertzog Cooke (1807-1896):

John Rodgers (1833-1891): 18
Flora (1836-1923): 16
Maria Pendleton (1840-1926): 12
Julia Turner (1842-1902): 10

So Cooke's youngest child, his daughter Julia, was probably nine years old when the writer of Scenes Beyond the Western Border was moved to picture a young mother with her baby and compared the baby's voice to the sounds of a rippling river. Julia's mother was then 44.

But Herman Melville's wife Elizabeth or "Lizzie" (1822-1906) had recently given birth to the couple's second child: second son (their first was Malcolm) Stanwix (1851-1886), born October 22, 1851.

Born June 13th (same birthday as PSGC!), Lizzie was 29.

Not long after, the July 1852 installment (likely composed in March-April) again refers metaphorically to an infant, this time one who is not happy but crying:

. . . the extra two miles over the lofty dividing ridge was terrible work for wagon mules; and it bruised I fear fatally a pet antelope fawn, which I had in a wagon:—it lies now in a neighboring tent uttering from time to time cries and moans which are distressingly similar to those of a suffering infant; said its soldier nurse, with real pathos, "it is thinking of its mother." I purchased another at the Fort; and a goat foster-mother.
--July 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

Lizze experienced "a good deal of pain" and trouble while nursing Stanwix, as Hershel Parker describes:

But Stanwix's appetite [praised as "famous" by Maria his grandmother] was difficult to satisfy once Lizzie developed a breast infection. . . .

. . . the local physician, Dr. O. S. Root, advised her to continue nursing Stanwix from the left breast, despite the pain. The pain grew so severe that she decided she had to go to Boston to seek the help of the Shaw family physician, her uncle by marriage, Dr. George Hayward. --Herman Melville: A Biography V2.31-32

 Reporting on the follow-up in Boston, Laurie Robertson-Lorant explains:

Dr Hayward allowed her to continue nursing, but before long her right breast became clogged and the nipple cracked, causing her a great deal of pain. When the affliction persisted despite poulticing, he advised her to stop nursing.
--Melville: A Biography pp292-3

 The next and last figurative reference in Scenes Beyond the Border to the musical "prattle of children" occurs in the August 1853 installment. Melville's wife Lizzie gave birth to their third child and first daughter Elizabeth (Bessie) on May 22, 1853.

A gentle air rustles the grass or leaves; the running waters too, give music: and then, they seem the voices of gentle spirits, which may in this hour of calm and loveliness awake to Eden memories. As sometimes suddenly, the innocent prattle of children falls as music on the mother's ears, banishing happily, vexing cares,—so, nature now seems soothed, and harmony reigns. And as the mother, first musing in loving mood, then timidly questioning her happiness; —so too, to the eloquence of this sweet hour, my heart first beats a pleased response . . . . --August 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

Here the maternal imagery seems partly influenced by lines addressed To the Young Mother in Mattie Griffith's Poems. Allusions to Eden also abound in Griffith's 1853 volume. Kind of amazingly (how did I miss this before?), our manly Captain of U. S. Dragoons is once again feeling like a woman--comparing his own tranquilized emotions to those of a pondering mother soothed by the audible presence of her children.

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

What I said before, that was all introduction . . .

Chief Coacoochee or Wild Cat
from Joshua R. Giddings, The Exiles of Florida (1858).

From the September 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border:

"Then, of course, we marched back to the river bank; and lay down in our cloaks, supperless. But this is all introduction; I have tired you before the day is begun!" 

F. "'No, it is not very late; I was rather amused at your account of those spoiled Seminoles. . . ."

"F." in the dialogue above stands for Frank, the Captain's imaginary friend. (Altered in the 1857 book version to Friend.) From August 1852 through the end of the series in August 1853, these obviously invented prairie dialogues are typographically represented as conversations between "C." and "F."

The example below is from the start of a new chapter in Melville's The Confidence-Man renewing dialogue between, as we eventually learn, "Frank Goodman" and "Charlie Noble." Uh, that would be F. and C. As in the 1852 example above, the C. character is the one now telling the story, the one who speaks of what came before (here, a whole chapter and more) as merely an elaborate "introduction":

"Coming to mention the man to whose story all thus far said was but the introduction, the judge, who, like you, was a great smoker, would insist upon all the company taking cigars, and then lighting a fresh one himself, rise in his place, and, with the solemnest voice, say— 'Gentlemen, let us smoke to the memory of Colonel John Moredock;'. . . .

The reference by Frank #1 to "spoiled Seminoles" I take to be deeply ironic, the flip-side of Melville's featured charity, the "Widow and Orphan Asylum recently founded among the Seminoles."

For more on the Seminole wars in The Confidence-Man, check out the Melville chapter "Writing and Silence" in Removals by Lucy Maddox.

mountains and towers

Moonrise over Franconia Ridge in Winter
Photo: Ben Kimball via NH Division of Forests and Lands

Speak! thou pale and silent witness; tell of Earth's throes,—when a continent had birth: tell when the Storm-power chose these solemn mountain-towers, piercing the sky-mists for his throne? and his sublime laboratory of river-feeding rain; his fire-created and blasted, but icy throne! --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, September 1852; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? --Moby-Dick, The Whiteness of the Whale

“There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things . . . ."   --Moby-Dick, The Doubloon

Speak! apostrophes to a sperm whale's head, to the moon

Estes-Park

According to Merriam-Webster, apostrophe as a literary device means "a speech or address to a person who is not present or to a personified object." Things personified here are the sperm-whale's head in Moby-Dick chapter 70, and the moon in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border."

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. . . ."  --Moby-Dick, Chapter 70: The Sphynx

Speak! thou pale and silent witness; tell of Earth's throes,—when a continent had birth: tell when the Storm-power chose these solemn mountain-towers, piercing the sky-mists for his throne? and his sublime laboratory of river-feeding rain; his fire-created and blasted, but icy throne! --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, September 1852; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Like Ahab's apostrophe to that sphinx of a whale's head, the Captain's apostrophe to the moon in Scenes Beyond the Western Border makes reference to a hoary head--in this case the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains, pictured as "the continent's hoary head, the mark for battling thunders, since Lightning brooded over the great deep!"

Links updated 03/01/2020.

primeval

What an animated invasion of this primeval solitude: the prairie nymphs must shrink in amaze! Since the world began, this beautiful meadow was never peopled thus.  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, May 1852; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

The word primeval occurs once in Moby-Dick (1851), with reference to the legendary White Steed of the Prairies:

A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed.  --Moby Dick, The Whiteness of the Whale

And seven times! in Melville's Pierre (1852), for example:

". . . at fall of eve, Pierre emerged from long wanderings in the primeval woods of Saddle Meadows . . . ."

One instance of primeval in Pierre occurs in connection with deployment of armed troops by a powerful landlord:

" . . . and regular armies, with staffs of officers, crossing rivers with artillery, and marching through primeval woods, and threading vast rocky defiles, have been sent out to distrain upon three thousand farmer-tenants of one landlord, at a blow." 
--Pierre, Book 1

Melville's picture of marching troops entering the forest is similar to the example above from Scenes Beyond the Western Border, where emigrant wagons and dragoons on the march disturb the "primeval" natural setting of a western prairie.

Bermuda bound, 1888

Photo Credit: A Southern Kind of Love

Retired seniors Cooke and Melville in 1888 both chose the popular destination of Bermuda for their winter getaways. Independently and coincidentally, so far as I know.

Cooke was 78 years old, Melville 68.

General Cooke departed for Bermuda on Thursday, January 12, 1888:

The veteran General Philip St George Cooke, U. S. A., visited New York City this week, locating at the Windsor Hotel. He sailed for Bermuda on Thursday in the Orinoco.  --Army and Navy Journal, [Saturday] January 14, 1888

Eight weeks later, Herman Melville took the same ship and route. The Quebec Steamship Company's Bermuda Line sailed from New York on Thursdays. They advertised a 60 hour trip for the Orinoco, so I suppose Melville must have departed on Thursday, March 8, 1888. He arrived on March 11th, as Hershel Parker relates:

Melville escaped the Great Blizzard of 1888 by taking a sea-voyage to Bermuda . . . . Melville sailed on the Quebec Steamship Company's steamer Orinoco, Captain Garvin, from Pier 17, North River, at 2 p.m., perhaps wearing a distinctive shawlstrap that his granddaughter Frances remembered from his later outings. The Orinoco arrived in Bermuda on 11 March, in fine weather, as the Great Blizzard of 1888 was commencing in New York, but passengers were kept on board two days.  --Herman Melville: A Biography V2.893