Taken with Melville's narrative voice, which I haven't read for some years. Also, his insights:
( re a dreamy youth standing watch at the top of the mast) "...lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; take the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gilding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over."
( re a dreamy youth standing watch at the top of the mast) "...lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; take the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gilding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over."