124 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 



edness, which gives all things their places, and is the ever-vigilant 

 balance of the soul; and even-bodiedness, which lays us along under 

 our happy coverlets, and makes our slumber as still as our good con- 

 science. This state is the rare complement of lop-sided pleasures 

 and duties; of the swoons of delirious sense, and the trances of the 

 ascetic soul : and he breathes best who most completely enjoys it. 



We have now seen how fully the breathing is inhabited by the liv- 

 ing powers, and how our breasts heave with our natures and our minds; 

 in other words, how the faculties of the soul go up and down through 

 the arches of respiration. We have seen what a thread of human 

 life courses through the actions of the lungs, and by them is trans- 

 ferred to the organs. One function then of the lungs consists in 

 equating the body with the soul, and momentaneously keeping up 

 the equation. But these organs produce also the momentaneous 

 connection between the psychical and corporeal frames. For if it 

 is they that give motion to every organ; that attract material sense 

 from the world towards the head; that represent all emotions, pas- 

 sions, and imaginations, and give them to the body; and by their 

 power of station are the footstool of thought and will, first submis- 

 sion to which they likewise embody : if it is they that sleep with 

 sleep and that wake with waking : again, if it is they that prepare 

 the body by a model agency for every action ; and furthermore, that 

 draw down the real spirit of the brain into the body, or, in other 

 words, pump us out of our spiritual reservoirs; — then it follows that 

 it is the lungs which physically connect the organism with its ani- 

 mating soul. And what connects the lungs themselves with the 

 same soul is, that their movements correspond with those of the 

 brain ; whence the feeling which we all have, that in breathing we 

 are living. 



We have endeavored throughout this doctrine to follow learned 

 Vestiges, and .to show that knowledge, like organization, may pass 



while the mental breath endures, we know not how long : for as the poet says of 

 the Forum — 



" Still the eloquent air burns, breathes with Cicero." 



Poor Byron! Even for the skeptics, as soon as they begin to sing, nature is 

 either nothing, or haunted ! 



