Moby Dick

by Herman Melville

God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

portentousness.

that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice.

say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution,

So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically

yet, when the cunning jeweller would show