Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe;
in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks
furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still
rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon
the Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith,
but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it
heads some other way.
"Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded
thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas;
thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the
wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm.
Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone
round again, without a lesson to me.
"Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring,
rainbowed jet!--that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain!
In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon
all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again.
Yet dost thou darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith.
All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed
by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.
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