𝕷𝖚𝖈𝖆𝖘

In Ch. 85 of Moby-Dick, Melville writes about the whale's spout and relates it to how the sperm whale is "both ponderous and profound."

Further,

I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts.

Melville even claims to have seen himself under a spouting of thought when writing in front of a mirror, surely something that came about "while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea."

Which makes me think of "upfixes" in comic art (e.g. storm clouds, scribbles, lightbulbs that hover just above a character's head), why and how they work to communicate internal mental states—and whether or not Melville is presaging them here, or if they'd already been in use in the mid 19th C.

And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.