"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads,
"we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast
not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth
whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps
there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon;
but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant,
unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of
that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature;
and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him;
every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form,
seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that
only people the soul by continually flitting through it.
In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came;
becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's
sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every
shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted
by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea;
by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.
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