.. < 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
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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
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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!
..