In each example the writer likes to talk and philosophize while traveling, in the company of at least one imaginary friend. From Melville's Mardi (1849):
Under a gilded guise, happiness is still their instinctive aim. But vain, Yoomy, to snatch at Happiness. Of that we may not pluck and eat....
"Then I heard:—'No mind but Oro's can know all; no mind that knows not all can be content; content alone approximates to happiness....
Beatitude there is none. And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from great woes—no more. Great Love is sad; and heaven is Love.More on the same theme, from "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," June 1852:
I. F. "You believe, then, that human happiness is to be found in some reformed and higher state of civilization? Have I not heard you envy the fate of these red sons of nature—some wild chieftain—with two or three slavish wives!"
C. "I might envy his freedom from factitious laws—the tyranny and fanaticism of society. But as for 'human happiness'—ha! ha!—suffer me to laugh, I pray you (if you will not call that happiness). Happiness would be the infraction of an immutable law; that all sin, is certainly not more inevitable, than that all should be unhappy; 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. Strange! that laughter, man's lowest attribute, is distinctive; while the smile, which seems borrowed from Heaven, and which can confer rapturous joy, if not happiness, is shared, I think, in a slight degree by brutes....
... But it is a law that we ever seek happiness. And it is this free desert air alone, that emboldens me in the search, to question the dogmas which society holds so precious.
--Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 1852; also
Scenes and Adventures in the Army
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