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Deviating from his customary habit of annotation, Herman Melville inscribed lengthy but unattributed quotations on the inside covers of a New Testament and Psalms presented to him in 1846, one of several Melville-family bibles still in existence. (1) Scholarship has accounted for a far briefer quotation located on the front flyleaf of that volume, but the origins of the longer and rather more provocative quotations have until now remained elusive. (2) Here, I identify their source in Thomas Carlyle's translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Wilhelm Meister's Travels and suggest that the emphases and contexts leading up to each quotation within Goethe's novels should figure in discussions of Melville's choice...
