a poet's audacity

As shown by the Dantean fairy dance sequence, the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the Southern Literary Messenger is notable for exceptionally high literary aims and execution.  Here I want to continue exploring the remarkable literariness of the May 1853 number.  After the fairy dance vision, on the same night (supposedly July 25, 1845), the Captain and his imaginary friend revel in the experience of a mountain thunderstorm.  More fiction, fancifully spun from the plain statement in Henry S. Turner's 1845 journal:

“A hard rain after getting into Camp, much lightning & loud claps of thunder.”
--Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1845 (K113), Fold3

Without even mentioning thunder and lightning, William B. Franklin noted:

"During all the latter part of the day it was rainy."
(March to South Pass, 27)

 That's it!

However spare the factual information reported by practical-minded journalists of the 1845 Rocky Mountain expedition, the idea of a thunderstorm in the vicinity of Pike's Peak irresistibly leads the narrator in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" to Byron in the vicinity of Mont Blanc.  In the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, stanza 92, Byron depicts an exhilarating storm in the mountains above Lake Léman (Geneva).  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is an important subtext in "Scenes Beyond the Border," quoted here ("I live and die unheard / With a most voiceless thought" etc.); and here and here ("Reposing from the noontide sultriness" etc.).  UPDATE:  And from June 1852 a double dose of Byron, Don Juan here ("'Tis the vile daily drop on drop...) and Childe Harold here ("let me quit man's work[s]...").  And here, in the last sentence of the August 1852 installment, deleted in revision for the 1857 book:  "Farewell!  with him alone may rest the pain."

Byron's thrilling lines in canto 3 were well known and reprinted frequently, like many others from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in Murray's and other guidebooks for travelers in Europe.   Byron's own footnote to the stanza revealed that on June 13, 1816 he had witnessed such a storm at Lake Léman. 

That was the summer of 1816, the Romantic "summer of love" at Lake Geneva.

With Pike's Peak in view, the Captain's imaginary friend comes in with the thunder, just as in "The Candles" chapter of Moby-Dick, where the sudden appearance of "Old Thunder" Ahab at the side of Starbuck coincides with a volley of thunder during a Typhoon.  The fierceness of the storm delights the narrator and inspires his friend to declaim those magnificent lines from Byron:

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border"
Southern Literary Messenger 19 (May 1853): 314

Wait, did he really say fata morgana?  Yes but never mind about that right now.  Look at that long quotation from Childe Harold, canto 3, stanza 92:

                                                      —Oh night,
  And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
  Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light
  Of a dark eye in woman!  Far along,
  From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
  Leaps the live thunder!

Extensive revisions to this scene in the book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army (411-412) include making the quote much shorter, by deleting everything after "your strength."  In the next book chapter, the simile of the "dark eye in woman" gets worked back into the conversation between the Captain and his imaginary friend, but gone is the glorious leaping and booming "peak to peak" of the "live thunder."

Yes the passage from Byron was well known, and critically acclaimed.   The ninth volume of Byron's Life and Works gave an engraved facsimile of the stanza in manuscript.  Sir Walter Scott praised Byron's lines as a "picture of sublime terror, yet of enjoyment."  In an 1825 essay on "Lord Byron's Character and Writings,"  the prestigious North American Review lauded the passage as a matchless "burst of poetry" from Byron:

He has great vividness of conception, and great power of expression; and where the aspects of nature corresponded to the gloom and storminess of his own mind, there is sometimes a burst of poetry, which will never be excelled. The thunder storm among the Alps—every one recollects it....

Nothing can he more magnificent. There is here no imperfect personification. The mastery of the poet's spell is complete; and the thunder and the mountains are alive.

But here's the thing.  Along with high praise for Byron's romantic burst, the North American reviewer felt bound to criticize the aforementioned simile as inappropriate to the context:

 In the passage from Byron, it is true, that the light of a dark eye in woman, is out of place, not being in accordance with the gigantic sublimity and force of the images, among which it is introduced.  (North American Review October 1825, 341)

The image of power in a woman's dark eye struck some critics as too earthy and sensual and suggestively feminine, apparently.  The problem for this and for many American critics boiled down to Byron's "want of strong moral sentiment."

What we have to notice here is how the dialogue zeros in on the standard criticism, Byron's supposed fault of inappropriate sensuality--and dismisses it!  Here the imaginary friend Frank plays against type.  Normally the practical realist and materialist, Frank surprises the Captain by his unprecedented lapse into verse.  Not only does Frank recite the famous "Storm in the Alps" passage from Childe Harold, he essentially defends Byron from the usual charges of extravagance and moral recklessness by pleading poetic license, making allowances for the audacity of a poet:

F.— "...That 'dark eye in woman,' introduced with such beautiful expression, but with all a poet's audacity, to illustrate an Alpine storm, pleases you, does it not?"

C.— "Can you condemn it?"

Nobody condemns the figure of the "dark eye in woman"; both C. and F. effectively dispute Byron's critic of the North American Review.  C. would not think of condemning it.  Frank himself never condemned it, just the opposite.  In the book version, the question "Can you condemn it?" is dropped entirely from the dialogue.

Now then, whence this unexpected defense of poetic license, this contrarian prairie assertion of legitimacy by right of "a poet's audacity"? 

Somebody has been reading Frederick Schlegel on the "audacity and fearlessness of a poet" (Plays of Aristophanes):

All the peculiarities of the old comedy may be traced to those deifications of physical powers, which were prevalent among the ancients. Among them, in the festivals dedicated to Bacchus and the other frolicsome deities, every sort of freedom—even the wildest ebullitions of mirth and jollity, were not only things permitted, they were strictly in character, and formed, in truth, the consecrated ceremonial of the season. The fancy, above all things, a power by its very nature impatient of constraint, the birth-right and peculiar possession of the poet, was on these occasions permitted to attempt the most audacious heights, and revel in the wildest world of dreams, —loosened for a moment from all those fetters of law, custom, and propriety, which at other times, and in other species of writing, must ever regulate its exertion even in the hands of poets. The true poet, however, at whatever time this old privilege granted him a Saturnalian licence for the play of his fancy, was uniformly impressed with a sense of the obligation under which he lay, not only by a rich and various display of his inventive genius, but by the highest elegance of language and versification, to maintain entire his poetical dignity and descent, and to show in the midst of all his extravagances, that he was not animated by prosaic petulance, nor personal spleen, but inspired with the genuine audacity and fearlessness of a poet. Of this there is the most perfect illustration in Aristophanes.  
(Schlegel, Lectures on the History of Literature)

Oh yes audacity the word occurs frequently in Melville's writings.  In Mardi as in Schlegel and "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," the context is the nature and power of creative inspiration.  Melville's lecture on the South Seas linked audacity with the sensuality of Greek myths and traditions. To make art in "Art" requires Audacity with Reverence, exactly as in Schlegel.  In Clarel, Melville links audacity with Byronic sensuality in the person of the Lyonese--described by Hershel Parker in his great new book Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative as "a sensual, joyous young man." The sensual, joyous Audacity of the Lyonese meets the sadly earnest Reverence of the divinity student.   Astoundingly, in conversation the "light audacity" of the Lyonese leads eventually to this question divertingly asked of Clarel:

Blue eyes or black, which like you best?  (Clarel 4.26)

which in essence is the same question asked of C. in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" by his imaginary friend Frank.  Big difference is, C. does not hesitate to answer, and heartily:

F.—  "... but what then do you like?"

C.— "Blue, in man or woman!"

Melville's audacities

"fain would I unsay this audacity...."  (Mardi)

"to think's audacity"  (Moby-Dick)

Isabel's "attitude of beautiful audacity" (Pierre)

"audacity of the design"  (The Confidence-Man)

Polynesian "love legend" displays "audacity of the Grecian fables" 
(1858-9 Lecture on The South Seas)

Audacity—reverence. These must mate  ("Art")

"Laughed with a light audacity" (Clarel 4.26, The Prodigal)

Fairy Dance

William Blake
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, c.1786
Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED Photo: Tate

No better installment than May 1853 (written I conjecture here around October 1852) to show the exceptionally high literary style of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," without parallel in narratives of Western travel outside of Washington Irving. You would have to look a long long while to find anything so fantastical and fine as the Dantean fairy dance in this number of the Southern Literary Messenger:

Southern Literary Messenger vol 19 (May 1853) page 313

Among numerous debts to Dante's Paradise, the phrase "grace to loveliness" echoes Canto 8, where in the sphere of Venus, Dante recognizes Beatrice and "the new loveliness / That grac'd my lady" (Cary's translation).  The image of "many white robed fair" is lifted from Paradise, Canto 30, where Dante finds the "fair assemblage" of saints clothed in stoles of snowy white. With similar precision, the charming "smile of one" that lights up the ball and presides over the whole "happy scene" imitates the enchanting smile of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven in Canto 31:

... At their glee
And carol, smiled the Lovely One of heaven,
That joy was in the eyes of all the blest. 
-- Paradise, Cary translation

The writer's close reading of Dante's Paradise is certain.  Besides the debt to Dante, another prompt (hypothetically now) for the Captain's romantic vision might have been the recollection of Melville's Pittsfield neighbor Sarah Morewood as the presiding muse over costume balls and other memorable social events. The just-published book Taghconic by Godfrey Greylock (J. E. A. Smith) had described Sarah M. as the "cunning priestess" behind the music-box incident of September 1851, which—imaginatively transposed to the Rocky Mountains—seems recalled in the Captain's mysterious experience of a "sweet waltz" while lying on a rock.

As related by Hershel Parker in Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) at page 762, Cornelius Mathews called Sarah M. "Fairy Belt."  To the same effect, Smith's original 1852 account of the music-box incident at the "Rolling Rock" or (later) Balanced Rock, Melville's "Memnon Stone", is preceded by this reference to the elfin appearance of Sarah Morewood:

Her gay, fairy-like figure pressed against the rude, grey mass with such mimic might, reminded me of a task assigned, in some elfin tale, to a rebellious hand-maiden of Queen Mab.

... Indeed, indeed there must have been a deal of witchery in the cunning priestess who made that stern old rock breathe such mysterious and enchanting music. I wonder if ever there was anything in that broken champagne bottle which lay at the foot of the rock. When we had clambered with a world of pains on to the top of the rock, we, too, had music—merry and sad — "music at the twilight hour." Then, as the evening shades deepened in the wood, came low spoken words of memory and of longing for those far away.  --Taghconic; Or Letters and Legends about our Summer Home (Boston, 1852) pages 42-43.

 * * *
Minimally revised and corrected, the enchanting vision of the cosmic fairy dance from the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" appears in its expected place in the 1857 book version:

O, seductive combination of the graces, the brilliancy, the joys of loveliest life!—that givest grace to loveliness, poetry to motion, and gala gloss to all surroundings—that charmest by music, that expandest all hearts, and exaltest all souls to the power of love—the thronged, the gay, the glittering ball! 

O, soft viol, and tinkling guitar—last echo of old romance!—to this solitude you can bring bright memories! Methinks I see a "high hall," whose lights might shame the day; the many white-robed fair,-the far-reaching couples, floating in that fairy dance,—revolving, like the moon around the sun, in circling circles. 

The rosy summer dawn is lovely, and sweetly the birds sing in its praise;—but lo! the sun appears, and gives a magic brilliancy to all,—scattering diamonds and pearls upon the dewy green;—so, always to such pleasant scene, the smile of one, must give the light of enchantment!  

If it be not there,—or if it be clouded, no winter twilight more dismal then, than that glaring ball-room mockery.  -- Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 409-410.

wrecks

But fiery yearnings their own phantom-future make, and deem it present. So, if after all these fearful, fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;—yet, in bold quest thereof, better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.  (Mardi)

He seemed gifted with loftiness, merely that it might be dragged down to the mud....His soul's ship foresaw the inevitable rocks, but resolved to sail on, and make a courageous wreck. (Pierre, 1852)

Ay de Mi.  Our life is a sad struggle;—our material nature with its base cravings,—its cares for animal comforts, and all the ills of the flesh, preys upon and tethers the soul, which yearns for the Beautiful, the Noble, the Exalted ;—essays to soar in that sphere, whose types are the bright stars of Heaven! Or, clings to that electric chain of Love which binds humanity—and in the olden Time drew down angels!

I. F. Ay!  it is a fire that consumes; and sometimes burns to ashes the hearts and hopes of proud men, and leaves but wrecks, mournfully floating upon the dull currents of life. 

C. And welcome then, the rapids and the final plunge!

(July 1852; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 333-4)

Ooh la la! are we getting close.  One scrap from somewhere, anywhere could clinch it.

Frank appears with the thunder, like Ahab

"Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning."

At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.

"Who's there?"

"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire.
--Moby-Dick chapter 119, The Candles

My unconscious voice had brought the cynic to my side; who had wandered forth like myself: but just then, too, from the cold north, and from a dark cloud, which had glided there unseen—like a brooding secret evil—came the hoarse voice of a storm, and far-echoing solemn thunders.

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border,"
Southern Literary Messenger 17 (May 1853): 313

and Scenes and Adventures in the Army, revised as follows:

My unconscious voice had brought the cynic to my side, who had wandered forth like myself: but just then, too, from the cold north, and from a dark cloud, which had glided there unseen—like a brooding secret evil—came the hoarse breath of a storm, and its far-echoing solemn voice.

scoffer

December 1851
Southern Literary Messenger

 "Scoffer!  Thou knowest not what thou hast done."

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," December 1851; and, with significant revisions ("Scoffer!  Who art thou, so near?") in Scenes and Adventures in the Army, as shown below.)

"Who is that scoffer," said the man in gray, not without warmth.... 
(The Confidence-Man)

1857 version with revised dialogue
Scenes and Adventures in the Army, p. 270

romance and poetry

"... the romance & poetry of the thing thence grow continually, till it becomes a story wild enough I assure you & with a meaning too." 
(Letter to John Murray, 25 March 1848)

"Romance and poetry were synonymous—they were imaginative, not factual and not commonplace, and they were associated in Melville’s mind with a higher form of literature than factual (and partly fictionalized) travel and adventure narrative." 

(Hershel Parker, "Historical Note" to Published Poems; and
Herman Melville: The Making of the Poet)

OK, notice how the Captain's critical "Imaginary Friend" insists on this same contrast, but from the opposite point of view, much preferring a factual travel narrative of "surface wanderings":

I. F.  "Nay, Friend, I belong to earth—from thy flight descend not lower:  as your old fashioned friend, I feel interested in your surface wanderings; but let your double-refined poetry and romance go 'to the D—.'" 
(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, December 1851)

Revisions in the 1857 book include the following: 

Friend. — Nay, stick to the surface now; only "to the d — l" with your double-refined poetry and romance.  (Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

Anglo-Saxon Depredations

Billy Frank, Jr.

I. F. "Yes, far sweeter than this dark forest, fit haunt for Druids! There were bowers, fragrant with rich wild blossoms, vocal with the songs of birds! Under their arching vines the eye enjoyed a picture where the light danced upon bright leaves, shaken by gentle airs and which the smooth green hills and distant groves completed!"

"No fancy picture either! But I am not in that vein. How long will your "bowers," scanty though they be, escape the Vandal axe? How long will the law, the parchment defence of the weak red man, resist the Saxon?
(September 1851; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

"The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race."  (Typee)

The Anglo-Saxons--lacking grace
To win the love of any race;
Hated by myriads dispossessed 
Of rights--the Indians East and West.
These pirates of the sphere! grave looters--
Grave, canting, Mammonite freebooters,
Who in the name of Christ and Trade
(Oh, bucklered forehead of the brass!) 
Deflower the world's last sylvan glade!"  (Clarel 4.9)

UPDATE:  For "Vandal" as an adjective, compare the "Vandal axe" in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" with Melville's "Vandal burn" in Clarel 2.29.

no fancy picture / sketch / piece

"No fancy picture either!"  (September 1851; and Scenes and Adventures)

 "This picture is no fancy sketch...."  (Typee)

"Undoubtedly a portrait, and no fancy-piece...." (Pierre)

Imaginary Friend talks like Evert Duyckinck

E. A. Duyckinck

Historians of the American West understandably have wanted nothing to do with Philip St George Cooke's imaginary prairie friend.  They don't know what to make of him so they mostly ignore him—even when relying on Scenes and Adventures in the Army for primary source material.  Well for one thing, the invented "Imaginary Friend" or "I.F.," christened "Frank" in the August 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," is a literary device, serving to advance the aims of philosophical fiction through dialogue.  What John Wenke says of Melville's Mardi (1849) applies also to the ongoing dialogues and their function in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" / Scenes and Adventures in the Army, Part II:

The philosophical dialogue is congenial to Melville's loose episodic structure, with the questers wrangling indefatigably over such issues as the soul's immortality, art, inspiration, Oro (God), right reason, preexistence, atavism, and practical ethics.  A dialogue often generates from a contrived incident or setting that offers a quickly displaced point of departure. (Melville's Muse, 48-49)

For another thing, the device of the Imaginary Friend allows the writer to present and respond to criticism of the narrative itself, seemingly as it is being written.  Criticism of the narrative by the Captain's Imaginary Friend sounds like Evert Duyckinck, then editor of the New York Literary World, criticizing

the "painful contradictions" of Ishmael in Moby-Dick:  in subsequently deleted lines the imaginary friend claims to have the Captain "fairly pinned in contradiction" (August 1852)

and

Melville's aesthetic disregard in Pierre for "truth and nature":  when the Captain defensively explains that to please his imaginary friend (Frank), he added some poetry "most naturally and truly" (August 1853)

In May 1852 (before "Frank" got his name, when he was still called "I. F") appears the following exchange:

I.F. "Ah! gazing at the stars? The three mortal hours we passed on the verge of the table land, whilst the guide sought a clew to this strange labyrinth of hills, or mountains—"

C. "And found it, much thanks to the buffalo, and the aid of their paths—"

I. F. "Were enough, with an empty stomach, to evaporate an ocean of romance."

C. "Considering, too, how dry it was; we had not drank for thirteen hours."

I.F. "Considering, too, you slipped off alone to the island yesterday, and 'fell asleep;' but as I verily believe, only dreamed; for, in our silent ride to overtake the regiment, you were still rapt, past all observation."

I. F associates the image of diminishing romance, a disappearing "ocean of romance," with the effects of "an empty stomach."  As it happens, Evert Duyckinck is on record talking exactly that way after an 1848 excursion with Herman Melville:

I was out the other day to Fort Lee with Melville—a grand picnicking day.  The first lady & gentleman we came upon were in front of a table cloth spread on a rock and covered with hams, sardines, &c, affectionately mouthing to each other, the Lady of Lyons.  They had just reached the 'magnificent' Tale of Como hostage [passage,surely] "Dont [Do'st] like the picture lady?"  A remark she let fall that champagne didn't inhale on an empty stomach distressed the romance or whatever it was. 
(Evert Duyckinck to William A. Jones, July 28, 1848, quoted here from Jay Leyda's The Melville Log, 279)

"Whatever it was"?  That's E. A. D. for you. And I. F. / Frank, too:

F.  "Come now, no romance; you must tell how that was done."  (September 1852)

 If you ask me, that's a fine passage to read aloud with your lover!  . 

Mel. A palace lifting to eternal summer
     Its marble walls, from out a glossy bower
     Of coolest foliage musical with birds,
     Whose songs should syllable thy name! At noon
     We'd sit beneath the arching vines, and wonder
     Why Earth could be unhappy, while the Heavens
     Still left us youth and love! We'd have no friends
     That were not lovers; no ambition, save
     To excel them all in love; we'd read no books
     That were not tales of love—that we might smile
     To think how poorly eloquence of words
     Translates the poetry of hearts like ours!
     And when night came, amidst the breathless Heavens
     We'd guess what star should be our home when love
     Becomes immortal; while the perfumed light
     Stole through the mists of alabaster lamps,
     And every air was heavy with the sighs
     Of orange-groves and music from sweet lutes,
     And murmurs of low fountains that gush forth
     I' the midst of roses!—Dost thou like the picture?

     Pauline. Oh, as the bee upon the flower, I hang
     Upon the honey of thy eloquent tongue!
     Am I not blest? And if I love too wildly,
     Who would not love thee like Pauline?

holy water and the devil, a bit from Palgave on "Superstition and Knowledge"

In the December 1851 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," the narrating "Captain of U. S. Dragoons" has devils, witchcraft, and magic on his mind.  A riff on the howling of wolves invokes

"the 'witching' midnight hour."

Then, after an exchange between the Captain and his Imaginary Friend (I. F.) in which each one would send something "to the D—," the Captain refers humorously and familiarly to the power of holy water over devils as a kind of "magical" spell: 

 I. F. "A forfeit! Mathematics are infernal.'"

"— I assure you (it is a secret of mine) that nothing else known among men can cope with feminine logic; but that is magical; the d—l can as well resist holy water."

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border")

Demonology was much on Herman Melville's mind around the same time, as we know from notes Melville made from Francis Palgrave's unsigned essay on "Superstition and Knowledge."  Just two pages after one key source-page for Melville's verbatim notes, Palgrave explicitly cites the same power of holy water over devils, in the larger context of ritual magic and medieval "spells":

The rites of Christianity were secretly and silently blended with the magical ceremonies of the Eastern tribes, and the spells of the middle ages exhibit a strange confusion of the practices of the church and the Platonic cabala.  The sign of the cross alternates with the pentalpha, and the names of the Evangelists are added to the angels of the stars.  Holy water which chased away the demon, also assisted in consecrating the hallowed Lamen and the Periapt.
("Superstition and Knowledge")

As Geoffrey Sanborn discovered, Palgrave was Melville's source for what he called, in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne the "secret" motto of Moby-Dick.  That letter was written June 29, 1851.  In November 1851 Melville was probably still

"thinking of 'Superstition and Knowledge'"

(Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 2.15)

 when he described Moby-Dick as "a wicked book."

value and sources of highest art

Thinking and tinkering about aesthetics, all the while steeped in Byron...

 MAY 1853

Frank said, solemnly: " The present is all we possess: but we should turn from sad experience to the future; there to lay hopeful plans, with good resolves." 

C. —Labour and depravity are our curse: but blessings too are the high faculties of the soul: among which are poetic fancies, — perception of the beautiful, —romantic yearnings, which were given for cultivation; they elevate man's mind, and

'Make his heart a spirit—'

In cherishing these heaven-descended attributes, we can oft forget that we are animals too.  ("Scenes Beyond the Western Border")

1857:

... my Friend said solemnly: "The present only is ours; but we should turn from sad experience to the future, there to lay hopeful plans, with good resolves."

"Labor and care and depravity are our curse: but blessings too are the faculties by which we struggle above the Sensual;—perceptions of the Beautiful, and the Sublime,—all the elements of the Ideal realm, where, Fancy-borne, we draw the materials of highest art; they elevate poor grovelling man, and

'Make his heart a spirit—'

Thus to poetry, and much-abused romance, we owe the cherished oblivion of our animal natures. (Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 411)

From Melville's 1857-1858 Lecture on "Statues in Rome"

They appeal to that portion of our beings which is highest and noblest....These marbles, the works of the dreamers and idealists of old, live on, leading and pointing to good.  They are the works of visionaries and dreamers, but they are realizations of soul, the representations of the ideal....They were formed by those who had yearnings for something better, and strove to attain it by embodiments in cold stone.  How well in the Apollo is expressed he idea of the perfect man.  Who could better it?  Can art, not life, make the ideal?  (Melville as Lecturer, 150)

According to contemporary newspaper reports, Melville ended his lecture on Roman statuary by quoting famous lines from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Canto 4, 145):

“While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
  When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
  And when Rome falls—the world.”