THE WHITE WHALE 319 
the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a 
sorry remainder ! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magni- 
tude, all his proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency which 
in the sculptured Jove was hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, 
it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been im- 
pertinent. As on your .physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast 
head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never in- 
sulted by the reflection that he has a nose to he pulled. A pestilent 
conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when behold- 
ing the mightiest royalty on his throne. 
In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical 
view to he had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his 
head. This aspect is sublime. 
In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with 
the morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the hull 
has a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain 
defiles, the elephant’s brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mys- 
tical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors 
to their decrees. It signifies — “God: done this day by my hand.” 
But in most creatures, nay, in man himself, very often the brow is 
but a mere strip of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are 
the foreheads which like Shakespeare’s or Melanchthon’s rise so high, 
and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless 
mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you 
seem to track the antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the 
Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great 
Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the 
brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front 
view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in 
beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one 
point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, 
ears,, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one 
broad firmament of a forehead, plaited with riddles; dumbly lowering 
with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does 
this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed, its grandeur 
