Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose.

 

[Old Thunder]

Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.

 

[Old Thunder]

But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

 

[Old Thunder]

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.

 

[Old Thunder]

A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.

 

[Old Thunder]

Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant.

 

[fuzzygobo]

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come.

Whaling- no more blubbering! Melville was quite the rapier wit. 8)

 

[Old Thunder]

Ever and anon a bright, but, alas! deceptive idea would dart you through. -- It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. -- It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. -- It's a blasted heath. -- It's a Hyperborean winter scene. -- It's the breaking-up of the ice bound stream of Time.

 

[Old Thunder]

But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst.

 

[Old Thunder]

That once found out, and all the rest were plain.