text
stringlengths
0
226
your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the
seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel,
Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but
splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable
glasses!
EXTRACTS.
“And God created great whales.” —Genesis.
“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;
One would think the deep to be hoary.” —Job.
“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” —Jonah.
“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to
play therein.” —Psalms.
“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,
shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that
crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”
—Isaiah.
“And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this
monster’s mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all
incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the
bottomless gulf of his paunch.” —Holland’s Plutarch’s Morals.
“The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are:
among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balæne, take up as much
in length as four acres or arpens of land.” —Holland’s Pliny.
“Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the
former, one was of a most monstrous size. * * This came towards us,
open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea
before him into a foam.” —Tooke’s Lucian. “The True History.”
“He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,
which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he
brought some to the king. * * * The best whales were catched in his own
country, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said
that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two days.” —Other or
Octher’s verbal narrative taken down from his mouth by King Alfred,
A.D. 890.
“And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter
into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are
immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in
great security, and there sleeps.” —MONTAIGNE. —Apology for Raimond
Sebond.
“Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan
described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.”
—Rabelais.
“This whale’s liver was two cartloads.” —Stowe’s Annals.
“The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.”
—Lord Bacon’s Version of the Psalms.
“Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible
quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale.” —Ibid. “History
of Life and Death.”
“The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.”
—King Henry.
“Very like a whale.” —Hamlet.
“Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art
Mote him availle, but to returne againe
To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart,
Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the maine.”
—The Fairie Queen.
“Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful
calm trouble the ocean till it boil.” —Sir William Davenant. Preface
to Gondibert.
“What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid
sit.” —Sir T. Browne. Of Sperma Ceti and the Sperma Ceti Whale. Vide
his V. E.
“Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail
He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
...
Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears,
And on his back a grove of pikes appears.”
—Waller’s Battle of the Summer Islands.
“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or
State—(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.” —Opening
sentence of Hobbes’s Leviathan.
“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat
in the mouth of a whale.” —Pilgrim’s Progress.