Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.

 

[Old Thunder]

So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names -- a singularly common fashion on the island -- and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.

 

[Old Thunder]

And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language -- that man makes one in a whole nation's census -- a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.

 

[Old Thunder]

Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature.

 

[Old Thunder]

For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.

 

[Old Thunder]

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

 

[Old Thunder]

But, as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.

 

[Old Thunder]

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.

 

[Old Thunder]

But unlike Captain Peleg -- who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles -- Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn -- all that had not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest.

 

[Old Thunder]

Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad.