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MOBY DICK; OR 
ever pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates 
thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in 
his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning 
and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but be- 
come transfigured into still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided 
not, but deepeningly contracted ; like the unabated Hudson, when that 
noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the High- 
land gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot 
of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad mad- 
ness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That 
before living agent, now became The living instrument. If such a 
furious trope may stand, this special lunacy stormed his general sanity, 
and carried it, and turned all its concentrated cannon upon its own 
mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that 
one end, did now possess a thousand-fold more potency than ever he 
had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. 
This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains un- 
hinted. But vain to popularise profundities, and all truth is pro- 
found. 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, and 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 like- 
ness ! 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 long dissemble ; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his 
dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will de- 
terminate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, 
that when with ivory leg be stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer 
