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.
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.
But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn--all that had not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest.

Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Peleg.

Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore.