rd for the earliest sun.

THIRD DAY.

The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the
solitary night-man at the fore-masthead was relieved by crowds of the
daylight lookouts, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.

"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.

"In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all.
Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely
day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the
angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a
fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought,
had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels,
feels; _that's_ tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity.
God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a
coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains
beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was
very calm--frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which
the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is
growing now; this moment growing, and the heat must breed it; but no,
it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between
the earthly clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild
winds blow; they whip about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash
the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere
this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and
ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces.
Out upon it!--it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such
a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink
there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever
conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run
tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that
strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.
Even Ahab is a braver thing--a nobler thing than _that_. Would now the
wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and
outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as
objects, not as agents. There's a most special, a most cunning, oh, a
most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now,
that there's something all glorious and gracious in the wind