THE VENTRICLE OF FRIENDSHIP. 205 



man has met man by his first points of contact; the old are as gods 

 and influences to the young, and the blood of our hearts is no longer 

 vague and venous, but it is housed, and feels in the home the powers 

 of time descending from behind and from above, and giving it the 

 first force of past and future in the attachment of race. We gather 

 therefore, from the correspondence, that this fire of natural affection 

 plays upon this home and its inhabitants, and teaches them to 

 be posterity. We call this the hereditary auricle, into which the 

 blood flows by the pressure of fate, in the same way as generations 

 descend from the sources of parentage. 



The blood is now no longer indeterminate, but has received the 

 contagion of one life; the first cord of love or union has been 

 passed around it, and it is full of the household warmth; the right 

 auricle, the ancestor of all, has laid hands upon its generations. 

 But what in the meantime has happened? The solid has grasped 

 at the fluid, the love at its object; but as between solid and fluid, 

 where the solid is an open circular channel, it is plain that the total 

 object can never be caught; the attempt at seizure forces it into 

 progress : the maid pursued by the urgent lover is turned into a 

 stream by the friendly gods, just as he seems about to overtake her. 

 The right ventricle receives the one-lived blood, and fills with it. 

 What is the character of this new object of the heart, at which it is 

 next to grasp ? 



Into the right auricle several streams of blood distinctly emptied 

 themselves, old from the body and the brain, middle-aged from the 

 heart itself — though this in small quantity compared with the rest 

 in the hereditary cavity — and infantile blood or chyle in the current 

 of the rest. It was family which the heart desired, and the family 

 tie which its contraction took and gave. The feelings which we 

 have in our breasts were there at work, and are always there at 

 work, in ^minimis, upon our blood, making us naturally into parents 

 from our first drops upwards. In the right ventricles we have 

 another stage. All the life or blood which is not permanently 

 familiar, eludes the grasp of the auricle, and belongs to another 

 chamber. In the right ventricle there are no distinct streams from 

 different sources, but its blood enters it by a single great orifice, in 

 one uniform gush. The right ventricle has been aptly termed the 

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