Moby Dick

Back Forward Menu

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 earthy 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 unretracing progress in this
life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, 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 repose of If. But once
gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men,
and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no
more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will