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MOBY DICK; OR 
It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name 
he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men — has no substantive 
deformity — and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes 
him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should 
this be so? 
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but 
not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crown- 
ing attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted 
ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. 
Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so 
potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage 
in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the 
desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market- 
place ! 
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all 
mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It 
cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the 
dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there ; 
as if indeed that pallor were much like the badge of consternation in 
the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor 
of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we 
wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same 
snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white 
fog. — Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king 
of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse. 
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolise whatever grand or gracious 
thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest 
idealised significance it calls up a peculiar apparition of the soul. 
But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to 
account for it ? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, 
by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of white- 
ness — though for the time either wholly or in a great part stripped of 
all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but, 
nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modi- 
fied; — can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct 
us to the hidden cause we seek ? 
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, 
