Ah, Byron

White-Jacket

And was not Byron a sailor? an amateur forecastle-man, White-Jacket, so he was; else how bid the ocean heave and fall in that grand, majestic way?

 Letter to Thomas Melville, 25 May 1862

You remember what the Bible [Byron's Don Juan] says...

Annotation by Herman Melville in Don Juan:

This is excellent—the poetical abandonment of good-humored devil-may-care.  Byron is a better man in Don Juan than in his serious poems.

[As quoted in Edward Fiess, "Melville as a Reader and Student of Byron," American Literature 24.2 (May 1952): 186-194 at 193.]

 "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger 17 (September 1851): 569 / Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 569.

Strange, indeed, that of ten young officers, not one brought a Don Juan into the wilderness. Is it possible that already the torrent of steam literature has cast Byron into the drift?  How many verses of the sublime, of the beautiful,— of love, of hate, of joy and grief, of pathos and most comic bathos, does that name bring crowding on my memory.

Where's Bacchus?

Herman Melville, To Daniel Shepherd (1859):

Now, is it for oft cursing gold,
   For lucre vile,
The Hags do thus from me withhold
   Sweet Bacchus' smile?

Scenes Beyond the Western Border by A Captain of U. S. Dragoons (June 1851):

Here Venus never smiles; nor Bacchus grins....

Southern Literary Messenger 17 (June 1851): 372 ; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857).

but in degree

Mardi

Other worlds differ not much from this, but in degree.

Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 316

Human intelligences, emanations from Divinity, and partakers of God's nature, can differ in myriad worlds but in degree...

instinct = prejudice

Babbalanja the wandering philosopher in Herman Melville's Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849):

"Our very instincts are prejudices," saith Alla Mallolla....

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the Southern Literary Messenger Volume 18, July 1852, page 415; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857 and 1859) page 341.

... a kind of prejudice or instinct—often the same thing—

Books and Brains

But I don’t know but a book in a brain is better off than a book bound in calf—at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.

-- Herman Melville, letter to Evert A. Duyckinck on December 13, 1850; collected in the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth page 174.

* * * 

C.—" Well, well,—I wrote what pleased myself; and,—another object I have, which I did not mention: with scarce a book to read, if one did not write, I fancy the beef and pork and beans would in time form a coating round his brain,—turn it all perhaps to thick and solid skull! How is it with you, Frank? Does yours retain a slight softness?"  

-- Scenes Beyond the Western Border, Southern Literary Messenger 19 (August 1853) page 461; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army page 426.

Talk about Trelawny

Jack Chase in Melville's White-Jacket:

Trelawny was by at the burning; and he was an ocean-rover, too!

"...the prototype of Melville's early works is Childe Harold, or, to name a more specific model flavored with Byronism, Trelawny's Adventures of a Younger Son."  

-Henry A. Murray, Intro to Pierre Or The Ambiguities (Hendricks House, 1949).

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger (September 1851): 570-571.  Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857), 254-5.

I. F.—'The Adventures of a Younger Son' by Trelawny, is another instance; a book which I have read twice with delight; but it is out of print; I know no one who has read it.

"Excuse me, but I have,—and laughed till my sides ached. What a keen sense of the ridiculous. An original work altogether."

I. F.—And how superior to the sentimental tribe of heroines, is the Arab bride; and Van Scalpvelt [Van Scolpvelt] is a jewel.

"Yes, the eccentric and inhuman martyr of science; he is food for much laughter."

I. F.—De Witt and the nameless hero, are every inch sailors and soldiers too.

"Do you remember the Malay chief and his red horse?"

I. F.—Remember them! It is a splendid picture of glorious bravery—of heroic action!