Moby Dick

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effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam
off, the boats flew to the rescue.

Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine
caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily strength did
crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a time, lying
all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under foot
of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as
desolate sounds from out ravines.

But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
abbreviate it. In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes condense
to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused
through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary
in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their
life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous
intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures