120 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 



inanity is not in the breath which is taken in, but in that which is 

 given out; the former being planetary, but the latter psychical. 

 There is, then, something beyond foul air which man breathes forth ; 

 for the air is charged with the vital movements; there is the cha- 

 racter of the life wrought into the atmosphere, as drawn upon the 

 organs. And here again we turn to chemistry, aud demand of it, 

 besides the analysis of average breathings, the contents of the acci- 

 dental breaths emitted in peculiar moments ? We ask of it whether 

 the breath of mercy is foul to the lungs of those over whom the mer- 

 cy leans? Whether the laws of vitiated air hold here, or no? or 

 whether there is an angel- galvanism by whose tension at such times 

 the body and the air fly clean above matter and its pedantries? — 

 Whether there is any antiseptic significance in the fact, that Jesus 

 breathed upon his disciples, and said, receive ye the Holy Ghost? 

 or in this that we swallow the breaths of those we love, and listen 

 to the breaths of those we venerate ? Whether the last breath of 

 beloved friends, caught in all unsophisticated times, is exhaustively 

 represented by the formula, O+H+C? Whether the blood and the 

 body decompose in the same ratio during all states of the mind ? or 

 whether there are not moments, and degrees every moment, in the 

 ratio of destruction; moments of immortality in which no waste oc- 

 curs, and all intermediate grades between these and physical ruin 

 and decay ? And further whether there are not facts in human so- 

 ciety, as of intimacy, closeness of persons, community of breaths, 

 which show that the expirations of one man are in a cheerful and 

 life-giving sense the inspirations of another ? But chemistry can no 

 more analyze human air, than animal air and vegetable air, but it 

 throws them down before oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, the insati- 

 able Cerberus of the laboratory. On the contrary, we induce from 

 larger facts, not otherwise accounted for, that the motions of the in- 

 tellect and will, or the better faculties, are the salts of the human 

 air, which varyingly wrest it from the gripe of the chemical laws. 

 We induce that humanized (p 107) lungs have a duty to perform 

 to the social sphere outside, and that the expirations from such pay 

 back the world with usury for the simple air which the inspirations 

 take away. This, however, cannot be confirmed from the steams of 

 crowded assemblies, but from the closets of privacy, and from the 



