when you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated hudson, when that noble northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the highland gorge. but, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. that before living agent, now became the living instrument. if such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.