Icy Glen is a gloomy, moss-lined hollow on Monument Mountain that enters the account of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville’s meeting both as a real place and as a recurring literary image. During their mountain picnic, Hawthorne performed there with theatrical foreboding; later, the glen’s moss became a measure of green life growing amid the bones of a whale in Ishmael’s narration.

Setting and the Mountain Picnic

On 5 August, Hawthorne joined a picnic organized by David Dudley Field, a well-connected New York lawyer. The party set out for Monument Mountain, but a sudden shower sent the guests beneath a rocky ledge, where they drank champagne from a silver mug. When the sun returned, they continued toward the summit. The day’s excursion moved from exposed heights into the dark recesses of Icy Glen, a spot said to contain ice among its moss all year round.

Hawthorne’s Performance

The mountain setting drew both men into dramatic play. Before the party reached the summit, Melville clambered across a jutting rock as if hauling rigging and pretended to harpoon a whale-shaped pond below. In Icy Glen, the performance passed to Hawthorne: among its shadowed, Gothic-like surroundings, he called out warnings of inevitable destruction to the group. The shift from Melville’s exuberant mock whaling to Hawthorne’s ominous declaration made the glen a stage for a different kind of spectacle, one suited to his richer, more foreboding manner. Afterward, the party went to the Fields’ house for dinner and discussed a sea serpent reported off the Massachusetts coast.

The Glen in Ishmael’s Account

Icy Glen returns in Ishmael’s description of a whale skeleton transformed into a place of worship on an island he locates in the Mediterranean. The whale’s ribs bear trophies, its vertebrae are carved with a calendar, and an eternal flame burns in its skull. In the account, the image of the skull’s vaporous spout is joined to wood as green as the mosses of Icy Glen. The comparison brings the mountain’s damp, living vegetation into a scene built from a dead whale’s bones: decay becomes a support for growth, expressed in the paradox that life folds death and death trellises life. The glen thus carries the picnic’s shadowed landscape into Ishmael’s meditation on the whale, where death is not simply an ending but the ground from which new life appears.