Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind,
that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the
direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see,
that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates
his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove;
so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally
beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab;
since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than
the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this:
that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while
some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them
for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by
the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty
mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves
an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave;
not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality
in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab,
while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain
unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes,
a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur;
so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction.
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