Original research and riffs on Herman Melville, authorship, and nineteenth-century American literature.
What is this? Only Vine (Melville's stand-in for Hawthorne, partly) and a troubled divinity student, lounging together on a shaded bank of the Jordan River in Part 2 Canto 27 of CLAREL. A key passage oft examined for the intensity of Clarel's attraction to Vine. But I'm… pic.twitter.com/MRngilaDxM
— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) May 29, 2026
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| Footsteps of Our Lord & His Apostles, Title-page with engraving, "The Holy Sycamore" © The Trustees of the British Museum |
A fourth title by Bartlett, Footsteps of Our Lord and His Apostles in Syria, Greece, and Italy, was offered by rare book dealer Noah Farnham Morrison (1863-1950) of Elizabeth, New Jersey in his 1926 Catalog of Miscellaneous Literature No. 209, listed there on page 12.
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| Noah Farnham Morrison, Catalog No. 209 - 1926 |
2257. BARTLETT (W. H.). Footsteps of our Lord and his apostles. 12mo, pp. 248, morocco, map and ills., gilt edges. N. Y., n. d. 3.50
From the library of Herman Melville.
As indicated in Morrison's catalog description, this particular copy was a New York edition with no date given, acquired "From the library of Herman Melville." Price: $3.50, minus the 25% discount on all items in Catalog No. 209, as stipulated on the front cover. Morrison explained,
"I am specializing in Americana and need the room for that stock."
The proprietor of "The Ark" aka "The Sign of the Ark" or "Noah's Ark" in Elizabeth, NJ had a longstanding interest in Melville's own writings, as shown by his advertisement in the Books Wanted section of Publishers' Weekly No. 1209, March 30, 1895. Based at that time in Newark, Noah Farnham Morrison was seeking
"Herman Melville's Works, any, state publisher and date." (page 540)
Noah Farnham Morrison retired in 1943 and died on October 4, 1950 at the age of 87. From the notice of his passing in the Antiquarian Bookman:
"A specialist in Americana, he had opened his first book store in Newark in 1893. For over 40 years his Elizabeth store, Noah's Ark, was famous on West Jersey Street, until he retired in 1943. His stock of Americana was sold in six sessions by Swann's Auction Galleries in 1945-6."
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| Detail, front cover of Morrison's Catalog Number 216 - 1927 |
The full title of Bartlett's work is Footsteps of Our Lord and His apostles in Syria, Greece, and Italy: a succession of visits to the scenes of New Testament narrative. In his Catalog Number 209, Morrison gave the short title of Melville's copy as Footsteps of Our Lord and his apostles, without specifying the edition or publisher. However, Morrison did note the place of publication, N. Y. = New York, and the absence of a publication date on the title-page. Similarly, Melville's copies of Forty Days in the Desert (Sealts Number 48) and The Nile-Boat (Sealts Number 49) were also American editions, published in New York with no date indicated on the title-pages. Both volumes owned by Melville, Forty Days in the Desert and The Nile-Boat, were Fifth Editions published in New York by Charles Scribner and Company. Although Melville's copy of Bartlett's Footsteps of our Lord is now lost or (more hopefully) unlocated, it may have been Scribner's 5th edition.
All three titles were advertised together by Scribner & Company. Bartlett's popular works headed the list of "SUPERBLY ILLUSTRATED ENGLISH BOOKS FOR THE HOLIDAYS, 1865-6" in the American Literary Gazette and Publishers' Circular (Philadelphia, PA) for November 1, 1865. Listed first: Footsteps of Our Lord and his Apostles in Syria, Greece, and Italy: a succession of visits to the scenes of New Testament Narrative featuring "47 exquisite Illustrations on steel and wood."
As advertised in the Philadelphia American Literary Gazette, these holiday gift books were "Crown 8vo" in size which would make them smaller than the usual octavo--possibly close to the 12mo or duodecimo size of the book from Melville's library according to Noah Farnham Morrison. The advertised price of each volume in "Cloth extra, gilt" was $4, exactly one day's pay for a customs inspector at the Port of New York as Melville officially would become on December 5, 1866. As described in Morrison's 1926 catalog, Melville's copy of Footsteps of our Lord and His Apostles was bound in morocco leather which normally would have upped the purchase price by about two dollars.
Melville could have acquired the Footsteps volume when the 5th edition was issued for the holidays by Scribner and Company in 1865-6, or later. As indicated by Sealts in Melville's Reading, Melville's Forty Days in the Desert (like Footsteps in the 1865 ad shown above, a Fifth Edition published in New York by Scribner) was inscribed by Melville in New York City on January 31, 1870.
Melville's other copies of Bartlett's works are held by the New York Public Library in the Gansevoort-Lansing collection. Arranged by Sealts Number, the two Scribner editions, Forty Days in the Desert (Sealts 48) and The Nile-Boat (Sealts 49) are located in the Gansevoort-Lansing family library, box 329. As recorded in the relevant catalog entries at Melville's Marginalia Online, these two volumes were given by Melville's daughter Frances to Caroline W. Stewart. Sealts Number 50, the London edition of Bartlett's Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem, was a Christmas gift from Herman to his wife Elizabeth Melville. Also located in the New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Gansevoort-Lansing Box 329 according to the catalog entry at Melville's Marginalia Online.
Not Melville's actual book but still a boon to researchers, Scribner's undated Fifth Edition of Footsteps of our Lord and His Apostles by William Henry Bartlett is also at The New York Public Library, now located in the Schwarzman Building M2 - General Research Room 315. I checked, it has the same number of pages, 248, as the one at Noah's Ark. Google-digitized images from the physical volume at NYPL are available online courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library:
Possibly Melville borrowed something in Clarel (and perhaps in other writings) from somewhere in Bartlett's Footsteps of Our Lord and His Apostles. What remains to be seen.
"But they think everything we propose is crazy. They think it's unenlightened, that we want to take away rights... the middle ages ... You know the middle ages was also the time of the cathedrals and the abbeys, the founding of the comuni, the universities, the parliament, the epoch of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Saint Francis, Saint Benedict ... People who don't know where Matera is, let's not expect them to have read history books."Meloni sounded like Ungar debating Derwent in Melville's Clarel.
A magnanimity which our time
Would envy, were it great enough
To comprehend. -- Clarel Part 4 Canto 10 A Monument
Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (New York, 1876). Edited by Walter E. Bezanson for Hendricks House, Inc. (New York, 1960).
"... the poem engages the reader in a difficult journey, rather like the pilgrimage itself, on horseback--a mode of travel in which one cannot afford to lose concentration, and whose rhythm the tetrameter line echoes" (page 249).
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| Convent of Santa Saba via The New York Public Library Digital Collections |
Herman Melville's religious epic Clarel was first published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in June 1876. Months before, the work had been announced in the New York press as forthcoming. As things turned out, however, the earliest notices of Melville's new "poem on the Holy Land" were premature.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New-York.
The Publishers' Weekly - January 15, 1876
... A Poem on the Holy Land, Narrative and Descriptive. By Herman Melville.-- The Publishers' Weekly, January 15, 1876.
The announcement in Publishers' Weekly on January 15, 1876 indicated a different working title, with no mention of "Clarel," the name of Melville's student-quester:
A Poem on the Holy Land, Narrative and Descriptive. By Herman Melville.
The earliest newspaper notices picked up on the interesting generic characterization of Melville's new poem as "narrative and descriptive":
New York Daily Tribune - January 12, 1876
"A narrative and descriptive poem on the Holy Land, by Herman Melville, is in press by G. P. Putnam's Sons." -- New York Daily Tribune, January 12, 1876.
<https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1876-01-12/ed-1/seq-6/>
"A narrative and descriptive poem on the Holy Land, by Herman Melville, is in press by G. P. Putnam's Sons."-- Syracuse NY Daily Journal, January 15, 1876.
In The American Bookseller for March 1, 1876, Putnam's Sons announced the title as "The Holy Land. A Narrative Poem."
The Christian Union - January 19, 1876 "Herman Melville, who is best known in literature by his fascinating sea-stories, has astonished his many admirers by writing a poem on the Holy Land, which the Messrs. Putnam will shortly publish." -- The Christian Union, January 19, 1876.
"A narrative and descriptive poem on the Holy Land, by Herman Melville, is in press by G. P. Putnam's Sons."-- Chicago Tribune, January 22, 1876Herman Mellville, the author of "Typee" and "Omoo," who has long been absent from book authorship, has a poem on the "Holy Land" in Putnam's press.
31 Jan 1876, Mon New York Daily Herald (New York, New York) Newspapers.com
-- New York Herald, January 31, 1876.
Portland Maine Daily Press - January 29, 1876
"... a narrative poem on The Holy Land, by Herman Melville, who has heretofore been known only by his audacious romances,--Typee, Omoo and Moby Dick...."
-- Portland ME Daily Press, January 29, 1876.
Later in March Melville's publisher got the eponymous title right:
Nevertheless, in April another announcement, still pre-publication, gave the title of Melville's forthcoming work as "Clara":Mr. Herman Melville's narrative poem of a pilgrimage in the Holy Land, called "Clarel," will introduce him afresh to a new generation of readers.-- Publishers' Weekly, March 11, 1876.
Clara. A Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. A Narrative Poem. By HERMAN MELVILLE. 2 VOLS., 12mo, cloth, extra, $3. --Publisher's Weekly, April 22, 1876.
Melville's verse epic Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was officially published on June 7, 1876 according to this advertisement in the New York Evening Post:
Related post:
New York Evening Post - June 7, 1876
via Genealogy Bank
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| David Urquhart, 1805-1877. Diplomat National Galleries Scotland |
"Urquhartian Club for the Immediate Extension of the Limits of all Knowledge both Human and Divine."
Urquhartian: after Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611-1660), English polymath and translator of Rabelais.
A reference to the Scottish author Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611-1660), celebrated for his translations of the French writer François Rabelais (ca. 1490 - ca.1553).
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| Sir Thomas Urquhart via NYPL Digital Collections |
We shall not wonder at the learning of this book, if we reflect upon the antiquity of the author's family, which is clearly traced by his ancestor, Sir Thomas Urquhart, it is said, all the way down quite from its founder Adam. Antiquarian lore must have come to such a man as an inheritance; and the Hebrew and other roots been the daily fare of his childhood.
There is an amusing play of the imagination among etymologists and antiquarian travellers, in running up the genealogies of speech and customs to their tiny sources among the shadows of the dim and distant past. Our traveller is, perhaps, not entirely exempt from a slight degree of quixotism, any more than the many others who have bestridden their Rosinantes before him. But though enthusiasts, deep-grounded in ethnology, are very serious themselves in their laborious excavations of long-interred knowledge, they nevertheless exhibit a smack of humor to lookers-on like us. Does not genuine wit, for instance, flow from the ingenious lucubrations of Horne Tooke, or the learned Noah Webster, when, with a flash of light, they reveal the dark relationship of obscure, forgotten etymologies, and tickle us by sudden shifts of phrase with unexpected surprises, which everybody knows to be the soul of wit?
One of several excerpts from Pillars of Hercules relates Urquhart's visit to a "gambling establishment" or "club" in Tarifa, Spain. Repeating Urquhart's word club, the reviewer highlights "antiquarian theories" suggested by the peculiar brand of Andalusian cards they used "in a certain club," and the earnest imitation of English and French models of government by "grave politicians of this club."
Urquhart's diction, adopted by the anonymous reviewer in the Literary World, may have inspired Melville to denominate the "Urquhartian" organization a "Club" rather than another term like "Society" or "Lyceum" or "Association." Wrapping up, the reviewer summarizes Urquhart's Pillars as a narrative reconstruction of
"interesting and learned travels, composed of a mosaic, where natural philosophy and imagination, archaeology, the arts, military and descriptive, ethnology, history, and political science, have each contributed a characteristic stone."
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| New York Spectator - June 10, 1850 |
The more substantial, and less cheerfully tolerant review in the London Spectator was reprinted in the March 2, 1850 issue of Littell's Living Age volume 24:
Mr. Urquhart takes an oriental bath; and thereupon writes a disquisition on bathing among the Romans, the Moors, and the Orientals, and non-bathing among some other peoples, ourselves included, with a passing touch on cheap bath-houses, and the Mosaic and Moslem notions of uncleanliness. The traveller went on a sporting excursion, though he seems to have killed nothing; but he ate of the national dish called kuscoussoo, and anon he favors the reader with the whole story of it; how it is made, which is practical information—how to eat it—what authors have said of it—bread compared with kuscoussoo; including a digression upon wheat and its original country, which is not known to Urquhart, but he makes up for it by describing the origin of the “damper” of New South Wales, says a word on Indian corn, pronounces “England in the art of cookery behind every other people,” informs the world that pilaf is never eatable “when made by a Christian,” and closes the topic with some remarks on teeth. In the course of his excursions Mr. Urquhart set eyes on the Moorish haik; which he traces to the garden of Eden, to father Abraham, to the Jews in the wilderness, to the Greeks, to the Romans.Delightfully or damnably digressive, with a passion for endless "extension of knowledge" (Pillars of Hercules volume 1, page 157), this Urquhart seems the true namesake of Melville's fictive "Urquhartian Club for the Immediate Extension of the Limits of all Knowledge both Human and Divine."
* "The fiend-like skill which we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines — the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation which follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth." — Herman Melville's Marquese Islands.
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015020116904?urlappend=%3Bseq=32
As pointed out by Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein in Melville's Orienda (Yale University Press, 1961; and Octagon Books, 1971) some of the published commentary to which Melville alludes in Clarel was available in David Urquhart's The Spirit of the East (London, 1838; #727 in Melville's Sources, ed. Mary K. Bercaw).
Urquhart, a British diplomat, was known as an extravagant Turkophile whose enthusiasm clouded his judgment, and Melville's reference to him as an "eccentric ideologist" accurately reflects the view of his time. -- Melville's Orienda, pages 89-90
Even so, Melville made great use of enthusiasts and their crazy causes in prose and verse. For literary purposes, the more eccentric the ideologue, the better. That anonymous New York reviewer was on to something about the appeal of "quixotism" as displayed by David Urquhart in Pillars of Herclues:
But though enthusiasts, deep-grounded in ethnology, are very serious themselves in their laborious excavations of long-interred knowledge, they nevertheless exhibit a smack of humor to lookers-on like us. -- Literary World, July 6, 1850
"Know,
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 ——
“Oh, oh!”
“Yet knowing all self need to know
In self's base little fallacy;
Dead level of rank commonplace:
An Anglo-Saxon China, see,
May on your vast plains shame the race
In the Dark Ages of Democracy."
America!
https://books.google.com/books?id=BvRDAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA526&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
Her [Rome’s] legends—some are sweet as May;Although Derwent never precisely defines “legends,” the context suggests the genre of saints’ lives, conventionally termed legendaries. His enthusiasm for saints’ lives as a literary goldmine is Melville’s. Writing to his brother-in-law on “Saturday in Easter Week” 1877, Melville praised “legends of the Old Faith” as “really wonderful both from their multiplicity and their poetry” (Correspondence 452). To illustrate, he commended the biography of St. Elizabeth of Hungary by the Count of Montalembert, the same “book of the sainted queen” which he had presented in October 1875 to his cousin Kate.
Ungarnered wealth no doubt is there....
When much that sours the sects is gone,
Like Dorian myths the bards shall own—
Yes, prove the poet’s second mine. (Clarel 2.26:86-93)
With regard to poetry, it would be difficult to deny that [popular religious traditions] contain an inexhaustible mine….a source of poetry infinitely more pure, abundant, and original, than the worn-out mythology of Olympus. (Life of Saint Elizabeth, pages 88-89)Along with the mine metaphor, Melville was impressed by the critique of “worn-out” Greek myths. Absent the scorn, Montalembert’s comment underlies Melville’s idea that for “multiplicity” and “poetry,” legendaries like the Life of St. Elizabeth “far surpasses the stories in the Greek mythologies” (Correspondence 452). Montalembert’s long introduction, an effusive overview of religion, politics, and art in the thirteenth-century, repeatedly extols the poetry in saints’ lives. By “poetry” he means chiefly the imaginative, romantic display of “charming incidents, illustrative of all that is freshest and purest in the human heart” (84). Replete with “ineffable sweetness” (90), tales of saintly bravery and piety reflect “the implicit faith” held by Christians of every class in medieval Europe. Nevertheless, the poetic charm of saints’ lives is also an inherent quality that exists “independent of their theological value” (88).
Through clouds of myth investing him--Melville’s phrase seraphic glow alludes to the reception of the stigmata as related in Bonaventure’s early Life of St. Francis. As Francis prayed on a mountain side for a physical experience of the crucifixion, his devotions became so heated they produced a “seraphic glow of longing” that transported him skyward (Salter 138). The crucified Jesus appeared to Francis in the likeness of an angel who imprinted on his body the five wounds of Christ’s Passion.
Obscuring, yet attesting him,
He burns with the seraphic glow
And perfume of a holy flower.
Sweetness, simplicity, with power! (Clarel 4.14: 69-73)
…that perfumed spellTimothy Marr reads these fragrant paradise flowers as a sign of Melville's "islamicist imagination," particularly evoking the cultural fascination with peris as beautiful and otherworldly female spirits. Another source for the scent of unseen “Paradise-flowers” is the section on Cecilia in the second volume of Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art. As Jameson relates, Cecilia made a secret vow of chastity before marrying a wealthy Roman named Valerian. After converting and receiving baptism, Valerian found the maiden sanctity of his bride divinely approved by the presence of “an angel, who was standing near her, and who held in his hand two crowns of roses gathered in Paradise, immortal in their freshness and perfume, but invisible to the eyes of unbelievers” (585; emphasis mine). Chaucer’s “Second Nun’s Tale,” another possible source, lacks two words used by Melville, perfume and invisible, that are to be found in Jameson’s prose sketch of Cecilia, the first of “Four Great Virgins of the Latin Church” (along with Agnes, Agatha, and Lucia). Holy fragrance links Cecilia and Francis as bona fide saints, and reveals more than we knew of Melville’s reading in hagiography and art history.
Of Paradise-flowers invisible
Which angels round Cecilia bred. (Clarel 1.29: 24-26)
Bercaw, Mary K. Melville’s Sources. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1987.
Berthold, Dennis. “‘The Italian turn of thought’: Risorgimento Politics in Clarel.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59 (December 2004): 340-371.
Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance. Ed. Michael Dolzani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Gibson, William. “The Brides of Christ.” I. St. Dorothea; II. St. Cecelia; III. St. Agnes. The Catholic World 25 (June 1877): 420-421.
_____. “The Brides of Christ.” IV. St. Catherine; V. St. Margaret; VI. St. Barbara. The Catholic World Volume 25 (July 1877): 556-557.
_____. “The Brides of Christ.” VII. St. Agatha; VIII. St. Lucia; IX. St. Ursula. The Catholic World Volume 25 (August 1877): 701-702.
_____. Poems of Many Years and Many Places. Boston: Lee and Shepard; and New York: C. T. Dillingham, 1881.
Goldman, Stan. Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993.
Greenwell, Dora. Lacordaire. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867.
Jameson, Anna. Sacred and Legendary Art. Third Edition. 2 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857.
Kenny, Vincent S. Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1973.
Knapp, Joseph G. Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Melville’s Clarel. New York: Philosophical Library, 1971.
Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Melville, Herman. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1991.
_____. Correspondence. Ed. Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993.
Montalembert, Charles Forbes René. The Life of St. Elizabeth, of Hungary. Translated by Mary Hackett. Introduction translated by Mrs. J. Sadlier. New York: Sadlier, 1870.
Obenzinger, Hilton. American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002.
_____. Melville: The Making of the Poet. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
Potter, William. Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004.
Robillard, Douglas. Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997.
Salter, Emma Gurney, ed. Life of Saint Francis by Saint Bonaventura. London: J. M. Dent, 1904.
Sealts, Merton M. Jr. Melville's Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
Sedgwick, William Ellery. Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944. Reprinted, New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.
Wallace, Robert K. “Melville’s Prints and Engravings at the Berkshire Athenaeum.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 15 (June 1986): 59-90.
Yothers, Brian. “‘Remember Hospitable Rome’: The Allure of Democratic Catholicism in Herman Melville’s Clarel.” Unpublished paper, presented at the 18th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association (Boston, MA), 24 May 2007.
_____. The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790-1876. Aldershot, Hants, England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2007.
"And some relatives have been left total mysteries--for example, cousin Doolittle, the Lenox expressman." --Jay Leyda, "The Endless Study." Postscript to The Melville Log (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) Volume 2, page 859.Leyda seems to mean the "Mr. Doolittle" that Herman Melville called "my cousin" and implicated in the sad accident that injured one of Sarah Morewood's horses. Where Leyda got the phrase "Lenox expressman" is not clear to me, but the tag would certainly apply to George Doolittle, resident of Lee in Berkshire County, Massachusetts and owner-operator in 1850 of "Doolittle's Express."
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| Pittsfield Culturist and Gazette - June 12, 1850 via GenealogyBank |
LEE via. Lenox to Pittsfield: every day Sundays excepted, in season for the trains of cars and Express Lines. All orders and errands entrusted to my care will receive prompt attention, with moderate charges.
GEORGE DOOLITTLE.
Lee, Feb. 1850.The reference to "cousin" Doolittle occurs in Melville's chatty letter of December 13, 1850 to Evert Duyckinck. The Melville Log partly transcribes this letter in Volume 1 on page 401 but omits the relevant passage about Doolittle and Mrs. Morewood's horses. As Melville relates, this "Mr. Doolittle" was on the railroad track in his sleigh and just missed colliding with an oncoming train. The train hit three horses belonging to Melville's then absent neighbor, Sarah Morewood. One of the three eventually died after suffering a broken leg in the accident. Melville's letter is reprinted on pages 172-175 in the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth. The same 1850 letter is accessible online via the Internet Archive in The Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (Yale University Press, 1960) pages 115-118. Here is an image from the original document, now accessible courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections:
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| Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "1850-1851" The New York Public Library Digital Collections 1850-1851. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ae98a990-1793-0133-e826-58d385a7bbd0 |
... one of my neighbors has really met with a bad accident in the loss of a fine young colt. That neighbor is our friend Mrs Morewood. Mr Doolittle — my cousin — was crossing the R.R. track yesterday (where it runs thro the wooded part of the farm.) in his slay — sleigh I mean — and was followed by all three of Mrs Morewood’s horses (they running at large for the sake of the air & exercise). Well: just as Doolittle got on the track with his vehicle, along comes the Locomotive — whereupon Doolittle whips up like mad & steers clear; but the frightened horses following him, they scamper off full before the engine, which hitting them right & left, tumbles one into a ditch, pitches another into a snow-bank, & chases the luckless third so hard as to come into direct contact with him, & break his leg clean into two peices. — With his leg “in splints” that is done up by the surgeon, the poor colt now lies in his straw, & the prayers of all good Christians are earnestly solicited in his behalf. Certainly, considering the bounding spirit and full- blooded life in that colt— how it might for many a summer have sported in pastures of red clover & gone cantering merrily along the "Gulf Road” with a sprightly Mrs Morewood on his back, patting his neck & lovingly talking to him — considering all this, I say, I really think that a broken leg for him is not one jot less bad than it would be for me — tho’ I grant you, even as it is with him, he has one more leg than I have now.Davis and Gilman were unable to identify Doolittle beyond the surname:
In what way Mr. Doolittle of the following story was Melville's cousin remains a mystery, upon which neither genealogies, local histories, nor family reminiscences have yet thrown any light.
<https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84865/page/n155/mode/2up>The Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence credits Hershel Parker with the identification of "Doolittle" as Robert Melvill. This explanation of "Doolittle" as a joking code-name for Herman's "hapless cousin" Robert previously appeared in Parker's article,"Moby-Dick and Domesticity," in Critical Essays on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1992) pages 545-562 at page 552. So identified in both volumes of Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1819-1851 page 798; and Volume 2, 1851-1891 page 626.
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| Pittsfield Sun - October 13, 1831 |
Thu, Feb 11, 1909 – 11 · The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, Massachusetts) · Newspapers.com
— Rolfe Doolittle, Adams Express messenger, has a splendid bird dog that came to him in a peculiar manner. It jumped from the express car on the Pittsfield-New York train yesterday. Adams Express officials have been trying to locate the owner of the dog but so far their efforts have been without success. The dog wears a fine collar but there is no name on it. --The Berkshire Eagle, February 11, 1909.
