Hepburn (DE 1055) - Naval Cruise Book

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Were Niagra but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousands of miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust boy with a robust healthy soul in him at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and make him own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper that meaning of the story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild im- age he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see it in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. MOBY DICK by Herman Melville