these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve
of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets,
and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read
the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael,
the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again.
Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion,
it seems--aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.
Yes, there is death in this business of whaling--a speechlessly
quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life
and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth
is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual,
we are too much like oysters observing the sun through
the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.
And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove
boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul,
Jove himself cannot.



CHAPTER 8

The Pulpit


I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable