THE HUMAN BEAIN. 383 



A wonderful organ the brain is the seat or the instrument 

 of the astonishing mental faculties of man, the link or mediator 

 between our body and our soul, between the material and the 

 immaterial, the external and the internal world. Here resides 

 our memory, which so marvellously resuscitates the past ; our 

 fancy, whose constantly-changing pictures enliven and beautify 

 our life; our judgment, which penetrates the mysteries of 

 Nature, and weighs causes and effects ; our sensibility, with its 

 multifarious passions and feelings ; our will, whose commands 

 flash with electric speed through our whole body, or oppose a 

 strong barrier to our inclinations. 



How small is our brain, and yet how immense the sphere of 

 its activity ! How many thoughts and pictures, and resolutions 

 and sensations, cross it in the space of a single day ! And as on 

 the bosom of the sea, sunshine and shade, and storms and calms, 

 are perpetually alternating, thus also this restless organ, in which 

 so many divine powers and noble aspirations are blended with 

 so many base desires, is the scene of perpetual changes ! 



And how various its scope and bias in different individuals : 

 in the assassin, planning his midnight murder, so that the blow 

 may not recoil upon himself; or in a Newton, meditating on the 

 laws that govern worlds ; in the sober man of business, who 

 carefully shuts out all fancy from his reasonings ; or in the 

 poet 



Whose eye in a fine frenzy rolling, 



Glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ! 



Who can paint the happiness, the bliss, that finds room in the 

 little human brain; or the nameless sorrow, the comfortless 

 despair, which there takes up its abode ? 



An organ so wonderfully gifted for the extremes of light and 

 shade may well be called a little world in itself; but as the most 

 costly vases are most liable to injury, thus also a trifle suffices 

 to destroy the faculties of this masterpiece of creation. Whilo 

 wafted along by the full-tide of his successful ambition, or soar- 

 ing aloft in the highest flight of his fancy, or plunged in his 

 deepest meditations, or fascinating his hearers by the noblest flow 

 of his eloquence the statesman, the poet, the philosopher, the 

 orator, is suddenly struck with apoplexy; and that masterly 

 policy, that blooming imagination, that profound wisdom, that? 



