445 
THE WHITE WHALE 
youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a 
thousand leagues of blue. 
There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose 
gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; 
like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried 
evangelist, St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, 
wide-rolling, watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four conti- 
nents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly ; for 
here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnam- 
bulisms, reveries ; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dream- 
ing, still ; tossing like slumberers in their beds ; the ever-rolling waves 
but made so by their restlessness. 
To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific once beheld, 
must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters 
of the world, the Indian Ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The 
same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but 
yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded 
but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while 
all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, un- 
known Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysteri- 
ous, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts 
one bay to it ; seems the tide-beating heart, of earth. Lifted by those 
eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your 
head to Pan. 
But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an 
iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizzen rigging, with one 
nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee Isles 
(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the 
other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that 
sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. 
Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding to- 
wards the Japanese cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified 
itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice ; the Delta of his fore- 
head’s veins swelled like overladen brooks ; in his very sleep, his ring- 
ing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stem all! the White Whale 
spouts thick blood !” 
