Harvey

“ How long this entertainment lasted, Harvey could not remember, for he lay back terrified at the sight of the smoking swells. He fancied he heard a gun and a horn and shouting. Something bigger than the dory, but quite as lively, loomed alongside. Several voices talked at once; he was dropped into a dark, heaving hole, where men in oilskins gave him a hot drink and took off his clothes, and he fell asleep. ”

“ When Harvey had gone the men stood just outside the fence and talked of him. Virgie went through the gate and leaned against the long chain that served to pull it shut, and there waited for him to come into view for the last time on the brink of a far-away hill. ”

“ I have hitherto dwelt upon the claims to our honor of Harvey the philosopher; one word, in conclusion, concerning Harvey the man. There have been great men whose personality one would gladly forget: brilliant capacities besmirched with the stains of inordinate ambition, or vanity, or avarice; or soiled by worse vices; or men of one idea, unable to look beyond the circle of their own pursuits. But no such flaw as any of these defaces the fair fame of William Harvey. ”

“ There he stood in the inner circle on the other side of Harvey's prostrate body fastening the belt around his waist. Tall, majestic, with the same unearthly beauty that I possessed illuminating his countenance. But his was the cold beauty of a statue. There was no warm, pulsing humanity to temper it. I wondered how I could ever have been drawn to him even in my thoughts.
"So we meet again, my Goddess," he said, "and I owe the meeting to your lover." He touched Harvey's inanimate body with his foot. ”

“ Harvey could see the glimmering cod below, swimming slowly in droves, biting as steadily as they swam. Bank law strictly forbids more than one hook on one line when the dories are on the Virgin or the Eastern Shoals; but so close lay the boats that even single hooks snarled, and Harvey found himself in hot argument with a gentle, hairy Newfoundlander on one side and a howling Portuguese on the other.
Worse than any tangle of fishing-lines was the confusion of the dory-rodings below water. Each man had anchored where it seemed good to him, drifting and rowing round his fixed point. ”

“ As they drove into the confusion, boat banging boat, Harvey's ears tingled at the comments on his rowing. Every dialect from Labrador to Long Island, with Portuguese, Neapolitan, Lingua Franca, French, and Gaelic, with songs and shoutings and new oaths, rattled round him, and he seemed to be the butt of it all. For the first time in his life he felt shy—perhaps that came from living so long with only the "We're Heres"—among the scores of wild faces that rose and fell with the reeling small craft. ”

“ Harvey is not what he was when the fever began, and he thanks God for it often, on his knees, though he is lonely, very lonely, never hearing her little feet pattering about now, except in his dreams. ”

“ In the end we all mounted Miss Harvey's car, and sailing off left the groom in the dust of the road, a dirty, smudgy, unintelligent-looking object, to whom Miss Harvey waved an indulgent farewell. He stood, staring after us with a dull, meditative set of his expressionless face.
"That's a man," said I, to my companions, "whom I am persistently endeavoring to avoid. He clings like a burr."
"Oh, he's great fun," said Miss Harvey, laughing.
"He looks respectable enough," said Perdita, kindly.
"He's just a treat," said Miss Harvey, as we hummed up the lane. ”

“ Harvey was waiting—a Harvey who looked handsomer than I had ever seen him. He wore a short length of green material wrapped around his hips, held at his waist with the jeweled girdle. It fell to a point a little above his knees. His legs were straight and firm, his physique marvelous. I found myself wishing that we could forget this foolishness of Lost Gods and think only of ourselves. As Harvey surveyed me, I was glad my figure was fine enough to stand the revelations of the close clinging garment he had given me to wear. He took my hand and led me along the corridor. ”

“ After violent emotion most people and all boys demand food. They feasted the returned prodigal behind drawn curtains, cut off in their great happiness, while the trains roared in and out around them. Harvey ate, drank, and enlarged on his adventures all in one breath, and when he had a hand free his mother fondled it. His voice was thickened with living in the open, salt air; his palms were rough and hard, his wrists dotted with the marks of gurry-sores; and a fine full flavour of cod-fish hung round rubber boots and blue jersey. ”

“ On Sunday morning, as Frank Harvey approached its ground, so sanctified by the many years of devotion and worship, the sun seemed to embrace and fill its beautiful homeliness with a warmth of affection. ”

“ The room was hushed in silence as Harvey's tear-stained face was bowed beside his friend. He spoke no word, and no touch of tenderness was felt except the slow tightening of his arm about the furrowed neck, holding the quivering form close in strong and silent fondness. David spoke at length. "I want you to come along with me, Harvey."
"Where?" Harvey asked in a startled voice.
"Oh, not there," said David, smiling. "You thought I meant the long, long road. No, not that; but I'm goin' to the communion, Harvey—that's what I meant—I'm goin' to join the church." ”

“ While you can never hear the name of Harvey pronounced without remembering that you are under many obligations to him! A thousand years hence, when society shall have made the great progress which may reasonably be expected, the name of Harvey will be familiar to every one who owns a heart, while that of Charles I. will be only a vanished shadow ”

“ They staid with all love and kindness, and moved up and down the paths of this work-a-day world as if they were quite unused to higher regions. Harvey seems, indeed, to have cared much for home friendships—for the love of his brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces, to all of whom he bequeathed some remembrance, thoughtfully selected according to what would be of most service or give most pleasure. ”

“ He whistled a tune as the liner went down the harbour, watched the smoke pour in black clouds from its funnel, then turned and walked away from the pier.
A glance at the sturdy figure, as he went along, would have satisfied anyone of the truth of the assertion of Harvey’s father, that he was able to take care of himself. The black sweater, albeit it rested under the disapproval and scorn of Mrs. Harvey, covered a broad, deep chest that indicated vigorous health; his thick winter jacket hung upon shoulders that were rounded and muscular. ”

“ When Harvey solved by his powers of reason a knowledge of the circulation of the blood, he only reached the banks of the river of life. He saw that the heads and mouths of the rivers of blood begin and end in the heart, to do the mysterious works of constructing man. ”

“ The work on which he had been chiefly engaged at Oxford, and indeed since the publication of his treatise on the circulation in 1628, was an investigation into the recondite but deeply interesting subject of generation. Charles I. had been an enlightened patron of Harvey’s studies, had put the royal deer parks at Windsor and Hampton Court at his disposal, and had watched his demonstration of the growth of the chick with no less interest than the movements of the living heart. Harvey had now collected a large number of observations, though he would probably have delayed their publication. ”

“ I sought in the Orations, and especially in the earlier ones, for something that might have enabled me to set the man Harvey before you, ‘in his habit as he lived;’ for while but few are gifted with any measure of his deep insight, or can follow even at a distance the track of his genius, it would profit all of us to learn the lesson of his patriotism, his loyalty, his open-handed bounty, his forgiveness of injury and detraction, his deep religious feeling. ”

“ It has come far from the sunshine and prairie grass where it started. Tall elm trees have grown from the saplings that were stuck in the sod thirty years before, and they limit the vision. No longer can one see over the town across the roofs of Market Street into the prairie. No longer even can one see from Harvey the painted sky at night that marks South Harvey and the industrial towns of the Wahoo Valley. Harvey is shut in; we all are sometimes by our comforts. ”

“ Harvey’s heart sank a little. It was hardly an auspicious beginning of a cruise on a strange craft.
Mr. Blake was back again in a few minutes. He was as cool as though nothing unusual had taken place.
“No, you keep the wheel a moment, while I light my pipe,” he said, as Harvey started to relinquish the post. Then he laughed, drew forth his pipe and a piece of tobacco, and proceeded to cut a pipeful with his knife.
“That’s Tom Saunders,” he said. “Gets foolish drunk the minute he steps on shore; never’s sober except when he’s afloat. ”

“ I always liked Mr. Harvey for his mother’s sake, and I have ever made him welcome.”
“I advised him to marry her—the squaw,” said Mr. Archer. “It will finish him socially, but in other ways it will make a man of him. Harvey is—”
Here they walked away to the bow of the Lethe, and Launa’s companion talked on, and she answered him.
She impressed him with her interest, her air of being fascinated by him, and all the while she was in torment. Harvey had held her hand! She took off her pale tan suede glove and threw it into the water. It burnt her; her hands felt hot. ”

“ It is usual to think ill of Harvey, because of his dislike of rhyme and his advocacy of classical metres, and because he complained that Spenser preferred his Faerie Queene to the Nine Muses, and encouraged Hobgoblin ‘to run off with the Garland of Apollo.’ But at that crossroad, where so many crowds mingled talking of so many lands, no one could foretell in what bed he would sleep after nightfall. ”

“ It was these very observations upon fishes and frogs, which eventually gained the day in favor of Harvey's ideas on the circulation of the blood, at which the learned men of his own age had laughed so much. He was dead by that time it is true, as has happened but too often in such cases, but do not let us pity him too much! He who has had the rare good-fortune to lay hold of a new truth, and launch it into the world, is sufficiently recompensed in advance. ”

“ Her population was more a mixture of chance inhabitants of a far different character than Frank Harvey had been led to believe, and as he sat, book in hand, before the window looking out upon the road that wandered down in a deep decline, edged by a handsome wall of autumn-touched trees, he wondered at the unusual gentleness that he had found here, where every tale had spoken of naught but wildness and depravity, and he was much at a loss for an explanation. ”

“ Nothing is there now so much in my vowes as to be at peace with all men, and make submissive amends where I have most displeased.’ Declaring himself tired of the controversy with Harvey, he acknowledged in generous terms that he had rashly assailed Harvey's ‘fame and reputation.’ But Harvey was deaf to the appeal; ‘the tears of the crocodile,’ he declared, did not move him. He at once renewed the battle in his ‘New Letter of Notable Contents.’ In a second edition of his ‘Christes Teares’ Nash accordingly withdrew his offers of peace, and lashed Harvey anew with unbounded fury. ”

“ So much care and circumspection in search for truth, so much modesty and firmness in its demonstration, so much clearness and method in the development of his ideas, should have prepossessed everyone in favor of the theory of Harvey ”

“ Some of the poems which he mentions to Harvey as then completed or on the anvil—his Dreams, his Nine Comedies, his Dying Pelican and his Stemmata dudleiana (singing the praises of the noble family, which was befriending him) —have not been preserved, at least in any form that can be certainly identified. Among the lost works was his English Poet—a contribution to literary criticism. He had sent Harvey a portion of the Faery Queen, which he was eager to continue ”

“ Such was the spirit of the times in which Harvey lived, and such the influences which surrounded his teachers before him and himself in turn. It makes [Pg 330] a long preface to a consideration of what Harvey himself accomplished, but it is not without its interest because men and their deeds must be judged largely by their environment. Now, to speak more particularly of Harvey himself, and what was known of the circulation when he undertook his investigations. ”

“ It is rather curious, moreover, to find Harvey, in his work on Generation, not entirely escaping the pitfall of which he was so well aware, and which he shunned so successfully in his earlier production. In the work on the Heart, he sets out with the certainty that the whole of the notions of the ancients on the heart and blood are untenable; and then, taking Nature for his guide, his fine intellect never once suffers him to stray from the right path. ”

“ Question as to Harvey's Originality.—The question of how near some of his predecessors came to anticipating his demonstration of the circulation has been much debated. It has been often maintained that Servetus and Realdus Columbus held the conception of the circulation for which Harvey has become so celebrated. Of the various accounts of the views of Harvey's predecessors, those of Willis, Huxley, [Pg 47] and Michael Foster are among the most judicial; that of Foster, indeed, inasmuch as it contains ample quotations from the original sources, is the most nearly complete and satisfactory. ”