1 It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 2 For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 3 But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 4 But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 5 But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 6 From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 7 Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 8 This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 9 Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 10 Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 11 Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 12 I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 13 But to such unresting vigilance over their dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated, both by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with them in so heavy a vessel.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho's Story. 14 I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale.