Moby Dick

So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with
Scripture names--a singularly common fashion on the island--and in
childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of
the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these
unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.  And
when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force,
with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the
stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest
waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been
led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all
nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin
voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some
help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty
language--that man makes one in a whole nation's census--a mighty
pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.  Nor will it at all
detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other
circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness
at the bottom of his nature.  For all men tragically great are made
so through a certain morbidness.  Be sure of this, O young ambition,
all mortal greatness is but disease.  But, as yet we have not to do
with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if
indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the
Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.