Ever and anon
a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.--
It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.--It's the unnatural
combat of the four primal elements.--It's a blasted heath.--
It's a Hyperborean winter scene.--It's the breaking-up of
the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies
yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst.
That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop;
does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even
the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons
with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents
a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship
weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible;
and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft,
is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array
of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering
teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair;
and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round
like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower.
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