When the world was young, it
begat more children; but now it is old, it begets fewer: for I may justly account new plantations, to be the children of former kingdoms.
This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now
begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.
The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last
begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
He then gave chase to Xanthus and Thoon, the two sons of Phaenops, both of them very dear to him, for he was now worn out with age, and
begat no more sons to inherit his possessions.
Your father married your mother by our aid and
begat you.
TEIRESIAS Such am I--as it seems to thee a fool, But to the parents who
begat thee, wise.
"That wine was not imported among us from foreign countries to supply the want of water or other drinks, but because it was a sort of liquid which made us merry by putting us out of our senses, diverted all melancholy thoughts,
begat wild extravagant imaginations in the brain, raised our hopes and banished our fears, suspended every office of reason for a time, and deprived us of the use of our limbs, till we fell into a profound sleep; although it must be confessed, that we always awaked sick and dispirited; and that the use of this liquor filled us with diseases which made our lives uncomfortable and short.
And this is he whom I call the child of the good, whom the good
begat in his own likeness, to be in the visible world, in relation to sight and the things of sight, what the good is in the intellectual world in relation to mind and the things of mind.
He said he could do the multiplication-table backward and paste sea-weed in a book; that he knew how many times the word "
begat" occurred in the Old Testament; and could recite "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" and Wordsworth's "We Are Seven."
'"It may seem a hard matter," says he, "to love our neighbours, who have so much of what is evil about them, and whose faults so often awaken the evil that lingers within ourselves; but remember that HE made them, and HE loves them; and whosoever loveth him that
begat, loveth him that is begotten also.
233-239) And Sea
begat Nereus, the eldest of his children, who is true and lies not: and men call him the Old Man because he is trusty and gentle and does not forget the laws of righteousness, but thinks just and kindly thoughts.
And here he dealt out justice and mercy in a rough way, and
begat sons and daughters, and hunted the fox, and grumbled at the badness of the roads and the times.