Great Lake break

Lake Superior

"... this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes."  

-- Moby-Dick chapter 54, The Town-Ho's Story. 

Philadelphia Inquirer - October 25, 1851
via GenealogyBank

The Town-Ho's Story by Herman Melville was first published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for October 1851. Reprinted in American newspapers including the St. Louis Missouri Republican on October 12 and 13, 1851; Philadelphia Inquirer on October 25, 27 and 28 1851; and Cincinnati Liberty Hall and Weekly Gazette on December 4 and 11, 1851.

In the Cincinnati Liberty Hall and Weekly Gazette for December 4, 1851, the first installment of "The Town-Ho's Story" was followed by the poem "Pumpkin Pies" By A Vermonter, reprinted there from the New York Tribune (July 8, 1851).

Notice of Clarel ("by an unknown author") in the St Louis Republican

St. Louis Republican - June 12, 1876
via State Historical Society of Missouri

CLAREL. A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land; by Herman Melville.—This is a long poem in four parts, viz.: Jerusalem—In the Wilderness—Mar Saba—Bethlehem, and two volumes. Think of it in these days of lightning and steam; two volumes of songs about the Holy Land and other holy things by an unknown author. Five hundred and seventy-one pages duodecimo of rhymes, and chimes, and bells, and knells. The poem of Clarel is more than twice as long as “Paradise Lost.” New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

-- St. Louis Republican, June 12, 1876; found in the digital collections of The State Historical Society of Missouri.