248 THE HUMAN HEART. 



come tender as they touch it ; the metals are plastic to its thumbs, 

 and granite is a gristly baby and has its melting moods in those 

 thin, dreadful arms. This chaotic love of softness and roundness 

 is the rudest circle of the ancestry of mothers in the heart of the 

 world, where the eldest crones of flame move purring and whirring 

 round "first matter" in its cradles; a giant preparation for finer 

 future tenderness in never ending circles. All force lies here in its 

 seed; for fire is dead love, or natura naturans. Its pulse is the 

 quickness of substance whereby it is self-similar in all property and 

 action; the urgency of gravitations, chemicals, gases and stones 

 from world's end to world's end ; that gesticulation by which each 

 thing thumps the board of existence, and lays down the law; as it 

 were the blood of time bounding uniformly in his mundane body, 

 and if felt at his wrist on this earth, then felt for his whole system, 

 whether in Arcturus, Pleiades, or Aldebaran. 



At the crust where earth cools, lo! a green creeping glow project- 

 ing a new earth on the ruins of the former. The first pipes of flame 

 are its models, and the crystals, veins and rockshafts its prophecies, 

 as they branch through the strata, or stiffen upwards in the vaporous 

 air. Seed, plant and tree have come, full of cool, calculating sap, 

 revolving organization; the vegetable heart, or the love of organism, 

 is beating. The steaming of the terrene crater issues now through 

 a skin of temperature, in musical flutes of a second fire, through 

 roots into new flames, which are trees, each the candle of a milder 

 light in which nature is seen. Brute heat ceases, and fire is culti- 

 vated. The roundness has a beginning, a middle and an end ; the 

 seed is current, and runs in gyres to other seeds; growth is the pur- 

 pose of this heart, and, like a bamboo-cane, every joint puts forth a 

 new joint, till the ground is covered with the green and gay chain- 

 armor of the vegetable soul. 



At the top of the love of groAvth, and running in its grooves, 

 there is already the love of pleasure, or the animal fire. The round 

 earth or tomb of the primitive heat is the ground, and organism is 

 the scaffolding, but pleasure is the heart, of the beasts. Hence a 

 new communion and a new circulation. This heart beats for the 

 alliances of the animal nature; the roundness comes closer; the birds 

 are mated and the beasts are paired; gregarious herds cluster into 



