books as friends

Walter E. Bezanson on Melville's reading and marginalia:

"The markings and annotations which he made in many of his books provide a rich index to his complexity of mind and temperament....Clearly he read in part for companionship.  He sat down among his books as among friends...."  (Hendricks House Clarel, xxviii)

 "Oh, my books! my favorite authors, how I miss you!"

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger, September 1851); and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

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.