However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the final; hung on to it so resolutely, certainly, that when at length the ship would have been capsized, if nonetheless persisting in locking arms with the body; then, when the command was given to interrupt clear from it, such was the immovable pressure upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables had been fastened, that it was not possible to cast them off. To analyse it, would seem unimaginable. Or is it, that as in essence whiteness will not be so much a colour because the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there’s such a dumb blankness, filled with which means, in a large landscape of snows-a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? Tell me, why this sturdy younger colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far faraway from all beasts of prey-why is it that upon the sunniest day, should you but shake a fresh buffalo gown behind him, in order that he cannot even see it, however only smells its wild animal muskiness-why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright?
However, it could also be enhanced beneath the law to a felony of the second degree if certain conditions are proven by the state (see above for statute particulars). “Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. I have a very good good friend who is stronger than me, and extra clever, among other issues. But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such energy to the soul; and more unusual and much more portentous-why, as we have now seen, it’s directly the most which means symbol of spiritual issues, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it’s, the intensifying agent in issues essentially the most appalling to mankind. And of all these items the Albino whale was the symbol. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked within the snowy symbol of their faction, the determined White Hoods of Ghent homicide their bailiff in the market-place! Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul? I don’t mean to say that he is the living example of younger American manhood.
And after we consider that different principle of the pure philosophers, that each one different earthly hues-each stately or lovely emblazoning-the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young women; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but solely laid on from with out; so that each one deified Nature absolutely paints just like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing however the charnel-home within; and once we proceed additional, and consider that the mystical beauty which produces each one in all her hues, the nice precept of mild, for ever stays white or colorless in itself, and if working with out medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its personal clean tinge-pondering all this, the palsied universe lies earlier than us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to put on coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind on the monumental white shroud that wraps all of the prospect round him. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there’s a higher horror on this whiteness of her woe. There isn’t any remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern house, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him something associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?
Not so the sailor, beholding the surroundings of the Antarctic seas; the place at occasions, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, as an alternative of rainbows talking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the considered annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky manner? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the title of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal ideas of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, begins to vigilance, and feels simply sufficient of trepidation to sharpen all his colleges; but underneath exactly related circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship crusing via a midnight sea of milky whiteness-as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he continues to be off soundings; heart and helm they each go down; he never rests till blue water is underneath him once more.