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 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 never weary?  Where is the foundling’s father hidden?  Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them:  the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—­

“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eyes!—­ Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways.  Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”

And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden light:—­

“I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!”

CHAPTER 115

The Pequod Meets The Bachelor

And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab’s harpoon had been welded.

It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home.

The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the last whale they had slain.  Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colors were flying from her rigging, on every side.  Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.