ndering
altitude--how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all
whale-ships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out
every time."

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of
Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with
lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who
offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware
of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be
killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes
round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor
are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery
furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded
young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches
himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and
in moody phrase ejaculates:--

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand
blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded
young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
"interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost
to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would
rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young
Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have
left their opera-glasses at home.

"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been
cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale
yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here."
Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in
the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of
vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep,
blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every
strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every
dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him
the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only peo