THE WORLD ON THE HEART. 195 



lost to individual ken, make the cope of the past blue and immense; 

 mythology, poetry, and language itself are the bright points in this 

 firmament, which still ray down to us the same message about this 

 primitive and perennial heart. Every man is still valued in this 

 sense by his heart. Every feeling comes from it and goes to it. 

 Resolve stands in it, or melts away from it; hope deferred makes it 

 sick; fortune sits upon the wheel of its capacities; it makes the 

 breast by which man touches man, or comes fairly forth from its 

 cage on great occasions, when heart touches heart. The most touch- 

 ing thing in the world, it is the most tangible too; it feels before 

 the fingers, and pulls the words from the speaker's tongue by an* 

 anticipated hearing. We should rather say, that all this is attribu- 

 ted to it since the beginning of time. Nor is the attribution lessened 

 to-day, but the air of the nineteenth century vibrates with this heart 

 and its properties wherever free or common speech endures. But 

 we cannot overlook the fact, that another heart has come upon the 

 carpet. 



The scientific heart is that hollow muscle of which we have spoken 

 in the foregoing pages; four rooms with nobody living in them; and 

 the hollow muscle has not been slow to suggest, that the ancient 

 heart is a figure of speech, and only exists metaphorically. Mean- 

 time, however, the latter cedes nothing of its prevalence, but the 

 words which express it are guarded by the whole atmosphere of life, 

 and keep their places under a weight of forty-five passionate pounds 

 to the square inch. Heavy dictates of sense will not allow them to 

 be evaporated. 



Hence arises imperfection and struggle. For an animal with two 

 hearts is lower in the scale than an animal with one, or in which the 

 two are twined cordially into a single organ. And then for struggle, 

 science, which has so much to learn by heart, makes a continual 

 enemy by setting up another heart beside that which has to learn it. 

 But if the two could come together, science would rise into warm- 

 blooded life, and memory, its register, would enlist a new set of 

 feelings in its service, and would become long and tenacious like the 

 heart itself in the higher sense. To say nothing at present of other 

 advantages. 



It is, however, a fair question, notwithstanding the tyranny of 



