Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley
of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon
the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him,
so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal
muskiness--why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the
ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of
any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the
strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated
with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New
England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?
No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles
from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending,
goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the
prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings
of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the
windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the
shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the
mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt,
somewhere those things must exist.
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