122 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 



A mass that is to be as one man must breathe alike in its parts. 

 The same thing is true of society, or unanimity in its higher depart- 

 ments. The heard breath of your neighbor is moreover regulative 

 and contagious upon your own, and increases and realizes the union 

 of which it is the effect, especially when the breath of all is repre- 

 sented in an audible rhythm. In this way the Eddas and poetries 

 bind mankind into sheaves, being as common respirations or great 

 world-tunes, the sum of beginnings of musical acts from the sailors 

 upon the river of time. 



And here we may observe that throughout life the lungs exercise 

 the dramatic office of producing in the frame those motions which 

 answer to the periods of existence. When the man is to sleep, the 

 lungs give the effigy of sleep in the system, and the slumbering soul 

 is imbedded in a slumbering body. When he is to awaken, the 

 breath of morning sparkles from the lungs throughout him, and 

 master and servant rise in a breath for their unanimous day's work. 

 As a child, his innocent brains find a sisterly helpmate in his playful 

 and peace-breathing lungs;* his blood and vitals, like his pretty face, 

 are full of sweet and innocuous motions; his lungs transplant the 

 childhood to his tissues; and soul and body, head and feet, he is all 

 one child. The youthful spirit again and the youthful body are each 

 the other's, and the bond between them is still lung, attraction, or 

 the lover's link. When he is a man, his lungs too put away child- 

 ish things; heart, liver, brain and bowels are engaged in manly 

 movements; the breath of manhood strengthens him; his vitals are 

 adult and personal; and the man lives well in an outer man who is 

 the body of his powers and the servant of thoughts. Age steals 

 upon him in the wants of a second childhood; he begins to breathe 

 fainter; his old days are a young lesson of living above the air; 

 and his last breath sets the body free as no longer able to move in 

 his service. And so from the beginning to the end of life, the body 

 conspires with the mind, through the friendly intervention of the 

 lungs. 



* Let the reader try to breathe like a child, and let the auditors of the breath 

 decide "whether he succeeds, or no. There is, indeed, in adult breath such a 

 peopling of multitudinous thoughts, such a tramp of hardness and troubles, as 

 does not cede to the attempt to act the infantine even for a moment. 



