Grassy glades, oh!
a shared trigram in MOBY-DICK and "Scenes Beyond the Western Border"
“Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul….”
— Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
In Moby-Dick Chapter 114 The Gilder, Herman Melville makes a prairie of the ocean. Here and elsewhere in the novel, Melville’s “pastoralizing of the sea,” as John Bryant has instructively termed it, “inverts the standard trope” of the ocean-like prairie with bold figurations of prairie-like seas.1 In the Gilder chapter, billowing waves morph into “the tall grass of a rolling prairie,” one of 17 explicit “prairie” mentions trickling through Moby-Dick. Later in “The Gilder,” Melville’s imaginary grass gets a lot greener and more suggestively expansive in the oft-cited apostrophe to “grassy glades,” idealized as Edenic “landscapes in the soul.”2 Figuratively speaking, these “grassy glades” represent an ideal realm that beckons as a beautiful oasis, offering a place of refuge and refreshment from the “parched” aridity “of the earthy life,” conceived as a spiritual or aesthetic desert.
Published in New York by Harper & Brothers, the first American edition of Moby-Dick was available in major U. S. cities a few days before the official release date of November 14, 1851. Less than two months later, a remarkably Melvillean literary apostrophe to “110 Mile Creek” on the Santa Fe Trail graced the January 1852 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” (1851-3). The tribute to “Hundred-and-ten” included three consecutive words (grassy + glades + oh) that Melville had distinctively combined in the “Gilder” chapter of Moby-Dick, in the same order.
“110 Mile Creek.”— Welcome as palm groves to the desert traveller,—as the bearer of glad tidings to the anxious soul,—welcome as home to the troubled and weary spirit,—so welcome thy forest, thy waters and grassy glades, oh ! “Hundred-and-ten !”3
Both texts feature the literary device called apostrophe, “a turning away” from the reader or other audience, helpfully defined on Poets.org as “a direct address of an inanimate object, abstract qualities, a god, or a person not living or present.” In “The Gilder,” Melville’s speaker (Ahab seemingly, though not certainly) is overheard to address plural “grassy glades,” abstractly regarded as happy places for the immortal human spirit. In accordance with literary convention, no real “grassy glades” are supposed to be present in Melville’s figuration. We’re all still on the Pequod. The larger significance of these “grassy glades” as intimations of immortality, glimpses of paradise, becomes manifest in the clause that begins with a second “oh,” addressing the same abstraction in ampler but equally poetic language as “ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul.” For good measure, as if this were a Hallmark movie, Melville throws in some horses cavorting in clover.
The writer of the 1852 text, ostensibly “A Captain of U. S. Dragoons,” turns from standard descriptive narration to address a favorite rest stop along the Santa Fe Trail known as “110 Mile Creek.”4 How long the speaker has been talking to the creek is not exactly clear. Two clues indicating apostrophe are the second person singular familiar possessive pronoun thy; and the interjection “oh!” The word welcome in the clause ending with the double-barreled exclamation “oh! Hundred-and ten!” connects with two previous instances of welcome, so that everything in the passage after “110 Mile Creek” can legitimately be read as an apostrophe, directly addressing the absent campsite which is now only present as a sweet and soothing memory. The first exclamation mark in “oh!” may be a typographical error. Intended or not, it was deleted in revision and does not appear in the 1857 book version where the same passage ends
… so welcome thy forests, thy waters and grassy glades, oh, "Hundred-and-ten ! "
Without the first exclamation mark, the revised phrasing “oh, ‘Hundred-and-ten!’” more closely parallels Melville’s phrasing “Oh, grassy glades!” and “oh, ever vernal endless landscapes….”
In another revision, the singular noun forest has been changed in the book version to plural forests. This change extended the parallelism of plural noun forms by matching “forests” to already plural “waters” and “glades.” Although “grassy glades” are not exclusively addressed in the 1852 text, they are key features of the absent thing that is being addressed and celebrated, along with “forests” and “waters,” through the literary device of apostrophe.
The larger symbolic importance of “110 Mile Creek” is evident in three similes of welcome. Two of these similes take the form “welcome as”; another plainly implies welcome without needing to repeat the word. By means of these similes the joy of reaching “110 Mile Creek” is compared to
palm trees seen by a wanderer in the desert
a messenger with good news for a worried “soul”
home when finally reached by “the troubled and weary spirit”
Thus apostrophized, 110 Mile Creek is an ideal of welcome variously figured as home, relief from existential anxiety, and a desert oasis.
Each of these qualities is re-asserted at the end of the January 1852 installment which closes out the matter of the 1843 escort of Santa Fe traders in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” Although the real expedition brought the narrating Captain and his U. S. Dragoons “home” to Fort Leavenworth, the re-write takes them and the reader back to 110 Mile Creek, “in memory.” Here the narrator turns aside, again, in a direct address to the absent campsite, personified as a “dear” host (distinct from the speaker’s other and—ironically—even more imaginary “matter-of-fact Friend”):
… But dear “Hundred-and-ten”! we shall never forget thy hospitable oasis;—there was little more poetry in it, than in thy singular name; (and thus both were highly satisfactory to my matter-of-fact Friend, with whom I there parted, with hopes of a future meeting.) But—with charred deserts behind,—and forgotten; and new storms before, but unforeseen,—we embalm in memory thy friendly shelter, and the calm repose of thy homely forest!”
Complementing the figurative language in the first “turning aside,” this second apostrophe represents 110 Mile Creek as a
“hospitable oasis”
“friendly shelter” and
“homely” place of “calm repose.”
Most directly, the interjection “oh!” in the 1852 apostrophe introduces “110 Mile Creek.” However, as noted already, “grassy glades” comprise a third of that, along with enticing “forests” and “waters.” All three features are implicitly referenced via apostrophe. In addition to the rare trigram “grassy glades oh,” shared elements of the apostrophes in Moby-Dick and “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” include allusions to deserts, souls, “weary” journeying homeward, “storms,” “calm,” and “repose.” As imaginatively presented in the 1852 re-write of the real Journal of the Santa Fe Trail by Philip St. George Cooke, “110 Mile Creek” offers a prairie variation of the elusive “harbor” that Melville’s moody speaker went looking for in “The Gilder” chapter of Moby-Dick.
In the present essay I obviously am not undertaking a rigorous statistical analysis of literary style for the purpose of identifying the writer or ghostwriter (or writers or ghostwriters) of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” Nevertheless, I remain interested in the potential value of such a project, if and when guided by generally accepted “best practices” of authorship attribution.5 Where Part-Of-Speech n-grams count as style markers, the apparent rarity of the three-word sequence grassy + glades + oh (n = 3 so a good old trigram, technically speaking) might, if verifiable, be usefully acknowledged in the presentation and interpretation of test results.
Possibly surprising evidence for the rareness of the trigram discussed herein may be obtainable courtesy of the ginormous HathiTrust Digital Library collection. Today my advanced search in “Full Text & All Fields” for the exact phrase grassy glades oh before 1853 yielded six results from only two different sources:
the 1st American edition of Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, virtual copy of the Rubenstein Library volume at Duke University, digitized for the Internet Archive.
Volume 18 of the Southern Literary Messenger (1852) where “grassy glades oh” appears one time only in the January installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” at page 49.
Extending the year to 1860 adds only book versions of the same passage in 1857 and 1859 editions of Scenes and Adventures in the Army. Goodness gracious! I don’t suppose that textual parallels alone will ever “prove” authorship, really, but this one makes an extra-extra fine example of writing pastoralizing apostrophizing like Melville in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.”
John Bryant, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volume 2 (Wiley Blackwell, 2021) page 668.
Discussion of this passage in published Melville scholarship has tended to focus on the problem of identifying the speaker. See, for example, David Leverenz and Emerson Littlefield. ""Oh, grassy glades!": Ahab or Ishmael? An E-mail Exchange" in Leviathan, volume 12 number 2, 2010, pages 53-66. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/492953.
“Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” January 1852 installment; reprinted in Scenes and Adventures in the Army: or, Romance of Military Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857 and 1859) Part II Chapter 5, page 280.
A hundred years ago William E. Connelley noted that “One-hundred-and-ten-mile Creek flows into the Osage River. It crossed the Santa Fe Trail about six miles east of the present town of Burlingame, Osage County, Kansas.” See “A Journal of the Santa Fe Trail,” edited by Connelley in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, volume 12, no. 1 (1925) pages 72–98 at page 77. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1891786. The well known landmark was commonly supposed to be 110 miles distant from either Fort Osage or Independence, Missouri.
Usefully surveyed by Tom A. Jerman in Chapter 8 “The Best Practices for Authorship Attribution” of The Fight for “The Night” (Asheville, North Carolina: Tintic Press LLC, 2023) pages 167-174.