David and Jonathan on the Prairie

David and Jonathan at the Stone Ezel
Edward Hicks (1780-1849)

1 Samuel 18:1

"And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul." 

2 Samuel 1:26

"I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women."

Who talks like that?

C.  O! my friend! Is there not then a pure soul-love, a deathless friendship, "passing the love of women," which all life's trials and the world's baseness cannot soil or sap?
August 1852, Scenes Beyond the Western Border

Interesting fact: in the book version, "passing the love of women" has been deleted, as shown here,
and the original interrogative mood has been made declarative.

Twenty years later the expurgated reference to 2 Samuel 1:26 shows up in Melville's verse epic Clarel (1876), with the question mark also restored:

Can be a bond 
(Thought he) as David sings in strain
That dirges beauteous Jonathan,
Passing the love of woman fond?
And may experience but dull
The longing for it? Can time teach?
Shall all these billows win the lull
And shallow on life's hardened beach?--
(Clarel 3.30)

1852, writing about this fire from heaven

Prometheus creating man in the presence of Athena
1802, Jean-Simon Berthélemy / 1826, Jean-Baptste Mauzaisse

Image credit:  © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

BUT Pierre, though, charged with the fire of all divineness, his containing thing was made of clay. Ah, muskets the gods have made to carry infinite combustions, and yet made them of clay!

Save me from being bound to Truth, liege lord, as I am now. How shall I steal yet further into Pierre, and show how this heavenly fire was helped to be contained in him, by mere contingent things, and things that he knew not. But I shall follow the endless, winding way,—the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land.  —Pierre (1852)

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! Yes: the struggle is ever, and leads us sorrowing to the dark portals which shut out the life beyond. There may this holy fire from Heaven find more happy sympathy. Here, amid ages of pain, it grants us but moments of felicity....  

(July 1852, Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

likes to say "Heaven help"

Heaven help the “Isles of the Sea!”—The sympathy which Christendom feels for them has, alas! in too many instances proved their bane.  (Typee)

To be short, Annatoo was a Tartar, a regular Calmuc, and Samoa—Heaven help him—her husband.  (Mardi)

"In either case, Heaven help the sailors, their wives, and their little ones; and Heaven help the underwriters." (White-Jacket)

"If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye." (Moby-Dick)

I. F. "Heaven help you of your mood! I give it up."  (June 1852)

"... the women generally are seen to weep. Heaven help them!"  (September 1852)

equilibrium

"... in their cool, sober moments of reflection; in the silence and solitude of the deep, during the long night-watches, when all their holy home associations were thronging round their hearts; in the spontaneous piety and devotion of the last hours of so long a voyage; in the fulness, and the frankness of their souls; when there was naught to jar the well-poised equilibrium of their judgment—under all these circumstances, at least nine-tenths of a crew of five hundred man-of-war's men resolved forever to turn their backs on the sea.  (White-Jacket, 1850)

"... those who suffer as little as they enjoy, have a calmness which may deceive. I prefer at times to disturb the philosopher's equilibrium, and to brave his fated reactions for the joy which for a moment sublimes both soul and sense."  (June 1852)

tufted

Bull's Tail, the principal chief (the buffalo, be it remembered,—for this confounded name needs some apology,—carries aloft his tufted tail in combat, like a black flag!) Bull's Tail then, a gentlemanly and mild looking man, made a short and sensible reply.... 
(July 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border);
and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

A favorite participle or verbal adjective of Melville's, tufted occurs 4x in Moby-Dick:

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. 

Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem's head.  (Moby-Dick)

Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. 

 The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs.
Moby-Dick (1851)

 also 3x in Mardi (1849); 2x in Typee (1846); and 1x in Omoo (1847):

Whereupon, the fierce little bull with the tufted forehead flirted his long tail over his buttocks, kicked out with his hind feet, and shot forward a full length.

THE TUFT OF KELP

All dripping in tangles green,
Cast up by a lonely sea
If purer for that, O Weed,

Bitterer, too, are ye?

welcome then

Niagara Falls - Horseshoe Falls, looking upstream the Niagara River
Photo courtesy of Tiiu Roiser from  www.freetiiupix.cwahi.net

Both texts quoted below were first published in the summer of 1852; and in both the introductory phrase "welcome then" is closely followed by and associated with links and chains, images of painful failure and bondage.  "I. F." you remember stands for "Imaginary Friend." 

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! Yes: the struggle is ever, and leads us sorrowing to the dark portals which shut out the life beyond. There may this holy fire from Heaven find more happy sympathy. Here, amid ages of pain, it grants us but moments of felicity....  

... Ah me! We are not only chained to the rock, but galled by all the thousand links,—the petty cares of life!
(July 1852, Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

Welcome then be Ugliness and Poverty and Infamy, and all ye other crafty ministers of Truth, that beneath the hoods and rags of beggars hide yet the belts and crowns of kings. And dimmed be all beauty that must own the clay; and dimmed be all wealth, and all delight, and all the annual prosperities of earth, that but gild the links, and stud with diamonds the base rivets and the chains of Lies.
(Pierre, 1852)

wonderful indeed

"Oh, Dickens! the Atlantic was thy Rubicon; on its broad waste thou didst shipwreck much Fame and Honor. Wonderful indeed that thou shouldst, in a day, turn two millions of admirers, firiends, into despisers! Whilst the arms of millions were outstretched to receive thee, and their eyes glistened with welcoming pleasure, in thy heart thou betrayedst them, and sold them to a publisher!" 
(September 1851, Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

Wonderful, indeed, was that electric insight which Fate had now given him into the vital character of his mother....

Wonderful, indeed, we repeat it, was the electrical insight which Pierre now had into the character of his mother, for not even the vivid recalling of her lavish love for him could suffice to gainsay his sudden persuasion.  Pierre (1852)

Melville's sister Helen got to meet Dickens in Boston.

"A great admirer of Charles Dickens, Helen wrote Augusta that she had shaken the hand of 'the great Boz' when he visited Boston in 1842, and she would never wash that hand again."
(Laurie Robertson-Lorant on "Melville and the Women in His Life" in
Melville and Women, 19)

"She  had not only shaken Charles Dickens’s hand, in February 1842, she had been granted a private visit with the Shaws in to the studio of Francis Alexander, the official painter of Dickens in Boston...."
(Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, V1.301)