His jets are erect, full, and black like soot;
so that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think
there must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below.
Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea
candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on
his pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan
is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds
in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells
like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer.
Thus, the fore-ground is all raging commotion; but behind,
in admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed,
the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert
mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture
lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life
for it he was either practically conversant with his subject,
or else marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman.
The French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon
all the paintings in Europe, and where will you find such a
gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that
triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way,
pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France;
where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights,
and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a
charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place
in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.
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