Besides, I saw it in his eye, that the man had been a reader of good books; I would have staked my life on it, that he seized the right meaning of Montaigne.

I saw that he was an earnest thinker; I more than suspected that he had been bolted in the mill of adversity.

For all these things, my heart yearned toward him; I determined to know him.
At last I succeeded; it was during a profoundly quiet midnight watch, when I perceived him walking alone in the waist, while most of the men were dozing on the carronade-slides.
That night we scoured all the prairies of reading; dived into the bosoms of authors, and tore out their hearts; and that night White-Jacket learned more than he has ever done in any single night since.
The man was a marvel.

He amazed me, as much as Coleridge did the troopers among whom he enlisted.

What could have induced such a man to enter a man-of-war, all my sapience cannot fathom.