Lie Idle Days in Patagonia. 
tuous milky sea; and now, after several months 
there came this snow-fall, and a vaster and stranger 
whiteness. My uppermost feeling at the time was 
one of delight at seeing what I had been hoping for 
months to see, but had now, when winter was so 
nearly over, ceased to hope for. This pleasure 
was purely intellectual; but when I ask myself if 
there was anything besides, a deeper, undefinable 
feeling, I can only answer, I think not: my first 
experience of snow does not lead me to believe 
that there is any instinctive feeling in us related 
to it; that the feeling which so many, perhaps a 
majority of persons, experience on seeing the earth 
whitened by the breath of winter, must be accounted 
for in some other way. 
In Herman Melville’s romance of Moby Dick, or 
The Whale, there is a long dissertation, perhaps the 
finest thing in the book, on whiteness in nature, 
‘and its effect on the mind. It is an interesting 
and somewhat obscure subject ; and, as Melville is 
the only writer I know who has dealt with it, and 
something remains to be said, I may look to be 
pardoned for dwelling on it at some length in this 
place. 
Melville recalls the fact that in numberless 
natural objects whiteness enhances beauty, as if it 
imparted some special virtue of its own, as in 
marbles, japonicas, pearls; that the quality of 
whiteness is emblematic of whatever we regard as 
high and most worthy of reverence; that it has for 
us innumerable beautiful and kindly associations. 
