*In Moby-Dick, when Ahab’s first mate, Mr. Starbuck, condemns the captain’s pursuit of “vengeance against a dumb brute” as blasphemy, Ahab replies, “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me” (164). Melville had doubtless read Webster’s speech. Webster’s sunspot metaphor was a variant on Lyman Beecher’s comparison, offered fifteen years earlier, of abolitionists to “he-goat men, who think they do God service by butting everything in the line of their march which does not fall in or get out of the way.” Lyman Beecher to William Beecher, July 15, 1835, in Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc. of Lyman Beecher, D.D., ed. Charles Beecher (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1866), 2:345.