This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.
But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.
Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de
Cluny where we here stand--however grand and wonderful, now quit it;--
and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls
of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man's upper earth,
his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state;
an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes!
So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king;
so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow
the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder,
sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye,
he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire
only will the old State-secret come.
Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely;
all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.
Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact;
he likewise knew that to mankind he did now long dissemble;
in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was
only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.
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