230 THE HUMAN HEART. 



heart when it has its objects, as the eye has the range of the mighty 

 universe of nature? And what the joy of the assimilative organs, 

 when the communion of man plays upon them, as the warmth of 

 the sun upon the skin, when the pleased sense opens out every 

 wrinkle of inaction into which the cold had thrown it down ? And 

 what will be the state of the brain when it lives in the truth, and 

 opens its sentient intellectual urns to the light that lighteth every 

 man who comes into the world ? The difference between that state 

 and ours will be at least equal to the difference between waking and 

 sleep; between life with and without an object; between the vigor 

 of the hero-angels, and the drawl of history, slimy with the torpor 

 of our own hybernation three thousand years long. Yet great as 

 this difference is, we are bound to believe that the Christian trains 

 for long ages have been crossing its deserts, and that a time will 

 come when the pleasures of the head and the heart will be as sen- 

 sible in the body as those of the belly ; and when in consequence 

 the body will be inwardly alive and active in its nervous and visceral 

 depths, more than now in its limbs, or its senses. 



We have further to note that the fullness of life depends upon just 

 intercourse between the steps in the sensory ladder. Pleasure or 

 bodily life is incomplete while its materialism only is felt, and the 

 heart untouched by the traveling joy, which as it comes down from 

 on high, longs to strike every cord where its music can be made. 

 But if the heart is incontinent, or has destroyed its delicious sen- 

 sorialness, the joy is spilt from it, and not felt excepting in the lower 

 regions. First love, the comedians say, is " all-overishness;' 7 the 

 whole body feels it; the house is lighted and the lutes are playing 

 from attic to kitchen, and the old neighborhood is amazed. Last 

 love is often another thing; life in holes and corners, but the former 

 halls dark and cold. So also the pleasures of the sensory of taste 

 have a similar wholeness in their design. Without the conviviality 

 which is the incentive of taste, and which supplies its heart touches, 

 these pleasures are poor and half dead, and savors themselves are 

 rinds with dust inside them. For as we said before, pleasure is given 

 upon conditions and for purposes, and the fullness of the pleasures 

 of the soul are the objects of those of the body. But the soul is all 

 over the body, and when it is conciliated, the sensation of its ap- 



