452 
MOBY DICK; OR 
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, 
slow heaving swells ; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe ; and so 
sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearthstone 
cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy 
quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the 
ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and 
would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a 
remorseless fang. 
These are the times, when in his whale boat the rover softly feels 
a certain filial confident, land-like feeling toward the sea; that he re- 
gards it as so much flowery earth ; and the distant ship revealing only 
the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through 
high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: 
as when the western emigrants’ horses only show their erected 
. ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing 
verdure. 
The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hillsides; as over these 
there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied 
children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when 
the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your 
most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, inter- 
penetrate, and form one seamless whole. 
Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as 
temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did 
seem to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath 
upon them prove but tarnishing. 
Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; 
in ye, though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life, — 
in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover ; and 
for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal 
on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the 
mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof : calms 
crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady un- 
retracing progress in this life ; we do not advance through fixed grada- 
tions, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, 
boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt (the common doom), 
then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering 
