at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absentminded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the masthead of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:—
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absentminded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise.
But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are shortsighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.