CHAPTER 23

  The Lee Shore

  Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall,

newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

  When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her

vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see

standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and

fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four

years' dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still

another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet.

Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield

no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of

Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the

storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The

port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is

safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all

that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the

land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality;

one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her

shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail

off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain

would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness

again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend

her bitterest foe!

  Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally

intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid

effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the

wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the

treacherous, slavish shore?

  But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,

indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite,

than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!

For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of

the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O

Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy

ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!