Chapter 25.00: CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.

**
CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
**

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded
mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive
bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm
but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the
man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage,
could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.
The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the
unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is
the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him
as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward
land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is
safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s
kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that
ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land,
though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through.
With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights
’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the
lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into
peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the
wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous,
slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite
as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be
ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like,
then, oh! Who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! Is all
this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee
grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight
up, leaps thy apotheosis!