HIGHER ANALOGUES OF THE LUNGS. 131 



of nature or of heaven. The necessity to be more and better than we 

 are, the divine dissatisfaction in which we live and move, is the germ 

 of understanding; it is the want which can never be done, but is 

 to breathe and ponder on through incessant ages. The under- 

 standing, like the lungs, is no wind, or shadow, but the substantive 

 power and voice of all our wants, calling us away to larger lives 

 and finer occupations. It is the consciousness of our position, and 

 of how to change it ; the solemn claim of the future on the present; 

 the beckoning of the universe to the atom, to come up among the 

 stars. 



This is the root of the lungs, this is the mind which they carry, 

 but mathematically speaking, what are the powers? Millions of 

 vesicles make one lung; greater millions of lungs figured afresh 

 make one humanity. Here they are want again; first, physical 

 wants, necessities, the iron understandings which are the mothers 

 of inventions ; the looms and hammers which must ever ply, or we 

 lapse into nakedness and starvation. Second, and based upon the 

 first, all the necessities of public progress which strain and distress 

 the time; domestic, political, social, and spiritual understandings; 

 which show us, in bold imagination, ideal commonwealths, built all 

 of white justice, and bid us strive, although we die, to reach them; 

 Utopian societies, lovely and reciprocal, peaceful in the length of a 

 redder sunshine, in plains beyond our travels' strength ; our own 

 and the world's infancy, painted with agonizing truth upon the 

 stormy skies of manhood, or the dark cope of age ; and with no 

 desponding voice command us to bo born again. These are signs 

 and warnings, portents, or promises, in every understanding; there 

 is no speech or language where their voice is not heard ; attracting, 

 commanding, or threatening, to one and the same intent ; and airy 

 or cloudy though they be, they stand in the breath of the eternal. 



