.. < chapter cxiv 20  THE GILDER >


     Penetrating further and further into the

heart of the Japanese cruising ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the

fishery.  Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen,

and twenty hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily

pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of

sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but

small success for their pains.  At such times, under an abated sun; afloat

all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a

birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that

like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of

dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil

.. <p 486 >

beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that

pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but

conceals a remorseless fang.  These are the times, when in his whale-boat the

rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the

sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship

revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not though

high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when

the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their

hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.  The long-drawn virgin

vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals the hush, the

hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these

solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked.


     And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy,

half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.  Nor did such

soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as temporary an effect on

Ahab.  But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret

golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing.  Oh,

grassy glades!  oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,

--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life, --in ye, men yet

may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting

moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.  Would to God these

blessed calms would last.  But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven

by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.  There is

no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed

gradations, and at the last one pause: --through infancy's unconscious spell,

boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then

scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of

If.  But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys,

and men, and Ifs eternally.  Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no

more?  in what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will

.. <p 487 >

never weary?  Where is the foundling's father hidden?  Our souls are like

those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our

paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.  And that same

day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea,

Starbuck lowly murmured: -- Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his

young bride's eye! --Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy

kidnapping cannibal ways.  Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I

look deep down and do believe.  And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales,

leaped up in that same golden light: -- I am Stubb, and Stubb has his

history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!

.. <p 487 >