Language in Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel"

A disappointing reread of a classic work that captivated me in my late teens, when I eagerly consumed this and You Can't Go Home Again and The Web and the Rock and Of Time and the River.  Coming back to this as an adult, I found Wolfe's mastery of the language to be overshadowed by the tedious storyline of an endlessly squabbling dysfunctional family.  But so many new words and new uses of words I pretty much quit listing them halfway through the book [I'll come back later when I have more time, to fill in the definitions and etymologies - just wanted to post this now and get the book returned to the library]:

"... the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock..."  A protective bodily substance, perhaps referring to the complement system.

"... the big angel with the carved stipe of lily stalk..."  The stem of a plant, trunk of a tree, from the Latin for a branch.

"... she liked to take her time, and came to the point after interminable divagations down all the lane ends of memory..."  From the Latin to stray off-course, incoherent wandering speech.

"... when he was drunk, her white pursed face, and all the slow octopal movements of her temper, stirred him to red madness."  Octopus-like.

"With her desperate sadness she encysted herself within her house and her family..."  Obvious in context, but the first time I've seen it used outside of parasitology.

"... as he heard the bell ringing itself to sleep, jerking the slatting rope about in its dying echoes."  Violent shaking of anything hanging loose in the wind, from the use of slat as a verb to mean strike.

"There were two beds; he exulted in his unaccustomed occupancy of an entire mattress, dreaming of the day of manlike privacy.  But Eliza did not allow this often: he was riven into her flesh."  I need help with this one, because to me riven means torn apart.  But I did find an archaic use of rive "to pierce."

"Lichenfels laughed gently, coughed - his wife was full of swart rich laughter."  Dark, swarthy.  From the Middle English and likely related to German schwartz.

"Will and Pett gave a heavy set of carving steels.  'I hope you always have something to use them on,' said Will, flensing his hand, and winking at Joe Gambell."  I have only ever seen this word used in reference to stripping blubber from a whale, a la Moby Dick.   Not sure what such a hand motion might be.

"... eating in vast halls upon an immense creamy table from vessels of old silver - eating strange fabulous foods - swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow, oiled mushrooms, calvered salmon, jugged hare, the beards of barbels dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, carps' tongues, dormice and camels' heels..."

"The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esemplastic power of his imagination..."

"... bringing him a plate of sandwiches and a tall glass full of clabber, which he had never tasted before."

"None of them looked Jewish: they all had a soft dark fluescence of appearance... Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling virgins of the South filled summer porches."

"... he would summons her by ringing out the number he had given her on the courthouse bell."

"His body as it sickened distilled a green bile of hatred against her crescent health."

"And all the wordy pinwheels of the clowns, which Margaret laughed at dutifully, and exhibited as specimens of the master's swingeing wit..."

"... with a grimace of itching nervousness while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand."

"Oh, boy, you are fine.  There is no atom in you that is not fine.  A glory and a chrism of bright genius rest upon you.  God bless you: the world is yours."

"Eugene spoke to her with timid hauteur."

"The wasting helve of the moon rode into heaven over the bulk of the hills."

"He lighted a cigarette, watching its red glowing suspiration in the mirror..."

"His association with Elk Duncan was one of the proud summits of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium which bathed that worthy..."

"The leaves were out in a tender green blur: the quilled jonquil spouted from the rich black earth..."

And a couple longer passages that speak for themselves:

"Yes, and the exciting smell of chalk and varnished desks; the smell of heavy bread sandwiches of cold fried meat and butter; the smell of new leather in a saddler's shop, or of a worn leather chair; of honey and of unground coffee; of barrelled sweet pickles and cheese and all the fragrant compost of the grocer's; the smell of stored apples in the cellar, and of orchard-apple smells, of pressed cider pulp; of pears ripening on a sunny shelf, and of ripe cherries stewing with sugar on hot stoves before preserving ; the smell of whittled wood, of all young lumber, of sawdust and shavings; of peaches stuck with cloves and pickled in brandy; of pine sap, and green pine needles; of a horse's pared hoof; of chestnuts roasting, of bowls of nuts and raisins; of hot cracklin', and of young roast pork; of butter and cinnamon melting on hot candied yams..." [this continues for four similar paragraphs in Chapter 8]

"This rooting up of his life, this adventure into new lands, the effort to improve his fortune and his state, was his wedding gift to his wife - a bold one, but imperilled already by distrust, fear, and his peasant suspicion of new scenes, new faces, new departures, of any life that differed from that of his village.  "There's no place like Henderson," said he, with complacent and annoying fidelity, referring to that haven of enervation, red clay, ignorance, slander, and superstition, in whose effluent rays he had been reared." [chapter 12]

"I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming.  Why here?  Why there?  Why now?  Why then?" [one of my favorite passages, and a fair exposition of a sort of butterfly effect and the interdependence of all things]

"“Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistening in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the little cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still lie, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again.” [perhaps the iconic quotation from this novel]