THE HEART OF FEELING. 199 



heart," but this is no part of the mere nature of which we are now 

 speaking. There are innumerable other attributions of feelings to 

 the heart, but they are either subordinate, or may be classified under 

 the foregoing. 



Each of these feelings is a warmth or fire peculiar to itself; each 

 gives a different glow in the breast; each shines with its own life in 

 its going forth. Yet they are one inseparably twisted ray, which 

 seen from its end is the quadrine star of human nature. They are 

 the withes and band-makers of our societies ; and they not only 

 draw their own kind about them, but are grappled each to each in 

 the fibrous motives of a mutual self-preservation ; kin and kind, 

 parents and partners — they are one man, clasping, and clasped by, 

 his fellows in the fourfold magnetism of nature. 



Let us see then whether these feelings have any correspondence 

 with the fleshly organ; in other words, whether the flesh be intelli- 

 gibly alive, and whether their signatures be legibly written upon 

 the muscular tables. 



We stated in the foregoing pages that the heart, by the blood- 

 vessels, is everywhere present in the body, and that the frame, in 

 one point of view, is a double tree of arteries and veins. Assuming 

 that feeling and heart are synonymous, each arterial space is of 

 course a part of the extended firmament of feeling. The organs of 

 the senses, for example, are a fivefold feeling of the external world, 

 receiving its impressions of five kinds through these channels. The 

 sensories, however, are neither more nor less than so many blood- 

 . works, constructed and maintained by the circulating streams. Sen- 

 sations are received, not in dead organs, galvanized by the brain, 

 but in a bed of structural desire, where the mind meets and marries 

 them, and carries them to the head. The heart then produces, by 

 continuity, and at a distance, these animal tendencies to five classes 

 of external objects. 



We do not deny the empire and influence of the brain. Each part 

 of the body, however, is alive, and each, so far as possible, is inde- 

 pendent. The heart, and all the feelings, live from the brain at 

 last, but the brain has sunk its capital in building them, and they 

 are no longer convertible; they are not brain, but heart and feelings. 

 They are alive, as their architect is alive ; and we cannot too often 



