putterings 132b < 133 > 134 index
stranger lands, disturbed the dust would be
would be, if by foreign travel I should ever be able to read straight along without stopping, out of that book...” It is to be suspected that this puttering boy, destined to travel in far stranger lands, disturbed the dust on books
—
ex Charles Olson, The Growth of Herman Melville : Prose Writer and Poetic Thinker; a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Wesleyan University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (1933) : 4
a rehearsal for Call Me Ishmael (1947) ?
The quoted passage — concerning D’Alembert in French, in the father’s “large library-case, tall as a small house” — is from Melville’s Redburn, His First Voyage: Being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service (1849) : 18 (University of California copy, hathitrust)
summary &c. at wikipedia