222 THE HUMAN HEART. 



in the feelings. Most of us are so full of these valves, that we 

 cannot attend to anything but the present, or believe that we ever 

 were little children, except in the sense of time, but not of state. 

 The present in that case is made of iron, and the imagination of the 

 past is a hatchway that shuts up, and transmits no beam from the 

 infantine days. There are then valves in life, which prevent it 

 from going back. And indeed this valve-function is universal. 

 The flaming sword that turned every way was none other than the 

 valve of Paradise. Death also is a valve, which nature keeps up 

 during all moments of investigation, or regurgitation, and only opens 

 from the other side when birth is to take place, and when nobody is 

 thinking that it is the same door through which the old citizens 

 have departed, and the ne\7 ones arrive. Yet the same it is, only 

 shut, contracted or earthy in the one case, and open, alive, fleshly 

 and maternal in the other. 



Valves then in the feeling heart are the present by its activities 

 shutting away the past ; memories are the states of the present in 

 which it endeavors to image the past; and they live especially 

 upon the roof of the cavities, or upon the outspread valves. 



The heart desire causes it to grasp at the object with which it is 

 now filled, i. e., the blood, and because life cannot go backwards, 

 (for the present stands at its back, and keeps it from the past), it 

 must go forward into the unknown, where no imagination can 

 hinder; for imagination is our limit, but of the future we have no 

 imagination that can dare to bound us. To-morrow is therefore 

 always an open door, and time streams onwards. And yet there is 

 an imagination of the future, which we term hope. Hope* however 

 is not a wall, but a hole in our advancing lives through which the 

 firmament is seen. Its sky has an arch of definite blue, but this 

 is, we know, not the end of things, but mercy's color for the weary 

 point of all our sight-rays. Hope is that hole-work in our nature 

 through which we see the heaven, and to which we stream by pro- 

 pulsion from behind, not less than by the unresistingness of the ori- 

 fice, and the attraction of the greater space, so immense and so 

 lovely. These hopes lead us on into the lungs or the universe of 

 the brain, and into the system, or the universe of the body. As 

 the past becomes impossible, the future opens, or as the blood can- 



