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“ Yet these natural and temporal uses of the bodily organ of touch, wonderful and important as they are, admit of no comparison with the spiritual and eternal uses of the same organ, whether viewed as an instrument of producing the sensation of touch, or as a medium of communication between the great world of outward nature and the little world of the human body. ”

“ I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,—give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen.] ”

“ The mighty demons of the storm have met
In battle fierce. Relentless anger fires
Their bosoms, proud of desolating power.
Their swords in rapid wavings flash; and oft
In lightning gleams illume the darkened earth. ”

“ In every eye, but in my thoughts most fair.
Like tapers on the altar shine her eyes;
Her breath is the perfume of sacrifice;
And wheresoe'er my fancy would begin,
Still her perfection lets religion in.
We sit and talk, and kiss away the hours
As chastely as the morning dews kiss flowers:
I touch her, like my beads, with devout care,
And come unto my courtship as my prayer. ”

“ His eager, worn face looks out from the helmet so calmly and so steadily, the flash of his armor, which gleams like real metal, the coal-black horse, which comes forward out of the landscape shaking his head-piece of blood-red plumes against the golden sunset sky and champing the golden bit, the grasp of the lance by the noble rider: well, painting can do no more than that. It is history, poetry, and the beauty of Nature recreated by the grand master. ”

“ There is that in the celestial prodigies—in gulfs of Time and Space—that seems to mate the greed of the soul. There is that greed in the soul to pass through worlds and ages,—through growths, griefs, desires, processes, spheres,—to travel the endless highways,—to pass and resume again. ”

“ Thatched roofs, whose ridge poles are beds of lilies, shaded by glorified green plumes of bamboo-trees, tall, red-barked cryptomerias, crooked pines, and gnarled camphor-trees, everywhere charm the eye. ”

“ Where is the girl so angelic as not to feel a slight curiosity to know how she shall look in a new and strange costume? Mary bent over the rock, where a little pool of water lay in a brown hollow above the fluctuations of the tide, dark and still, like a mirror,—and saw a fair face, with a white shell above the forehead and drooping wreaths of green seaweed in the silken hair; and a faint blush and smile rose on the cheek, giving the last finish to the picture. ”

“ Ariadne is in the foreground, full of warm, breathing life, her arm thrown over her lovely head, and her golden hair falling over the vase of gold and onyx on which she rests; a river of red wine runs through the emerald grass; two beautiful girls have just put by their music and instruments, and one turns her exquisite face toward us to speak to the other reclining on the grass. The one who turns to us is the beauty of the Louvre, or some one very like her, in full Venetian loveliness. ”

“ If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone of humanity? ”

“ When God gave the soul to Adam, it entered his throat and passed down into his bosom and belly, and wherever it passed, the earth, the clay, the dust, and the black mud became bones, nerves, veins, flesh, skin, and the like. ”

“ And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept, and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. ”

“ But whatever confused notions we may form of an union in place betwixt an extended body, as a fig, and its particular taste, it is certain that upon reflection we must observe this union something altogether unintelligible and contradictory. For should we ask ourselves one obvious question, viz. if the taste, which we conceive to be contained in the circumference of the body, is in every part of it or in one only, we must quickly find ourselves at a loss, and perceive the impossibility of ever giving a satisfactory answer. ”

“ Sound, Touch, Form, Taste and Smell. These Principles work through their counterpart-organs of the physical body which is composed of the five remaining Principles, viz., the Five Elements—Ether, Air, Fire, Water and Earth.
Now let us see how the physical body is composed of the five Elements. The vigor of our father and the blood of our mother, of which our physical body is made, are formations of assimilated food. Every kind of foodstuff, vegetable or animal, is but condensed form of earth's juice; earth-juice is earth. ”

“ Afterwards by divine operation and sovereign power, most strange and wonderful internal changes took place, and strong organs, passions, affections, and agreeable qualities rose up all adorned with beauty. When man comes to look upon his organs and members, whether upon the external, as the hand, the foot, the eye, the tongue and the mouth, or upon the internal organs, as the liver, the stomach and the spleen, he sees that each is the result of a special wisdom, that each one has been created for some peculiar use, and that each one is in its place and perfect. ”

“ There remains the pleasure of these eyes of my flesh, on which to make my confessions in the hearing of the ears of Thy temple, those brotherly and devout ears; and so to conclude the temptations of the lust of the flesh, which yet assail me, groaning earnestly, and desiring to be clothed upon with my house from heaven. The eyes love fair and varied forms, and bright and soft colours. Let not these occupy my soul; let God rather occupy it, who made these things, very good indeed, yet is He my good, not they. ”

“ According as the body is constituted and composed, as it is influenced by heredity, race, and [pg 285] selection, by nutrition, mode of life, climate, and other circumstances, there are developed in a hundred different ways what we call the natural disposition or character, inclinations, virtues or vices, passions or temperaments. Even the names given to the different temperaments emphasise this dependence of what is innermost in us, the deepest tendencies of our being, on the bodily organisation and the nature of its physiological constitution. ”

“ The organs, therefore, of bodily taste may be regarded as the basis of the organs of taste in the higher degrees of mind, and in this character may be serviceable and beneficial to those higher degrees—in like manner as every other basis is a necessary support to the superstructure of which it is the basis. For I need not inform you, that the all of the material world which we inhabit, and particularly the all of our material bodies, is but a basis, on which the spiritual principles of the higher and eternal world rest ”

“ What is this earthly body? I speak of my astral body, which envelopes the soul, my real self. I am no more bound to this body than you are to the black gown you wear at the present moment, which, by the way, becomes you immensely. ”

“ And we are led to recognise the truth of my preliminary proposition—that the bath is an instinct, and that, being an instinct, its survival of a race is no longer a wonder, but is a law of nature—a law of the universe. ”

“ The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineral or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came to have a kind of sacramental character, so deep was the feeling, in more serious minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health, beyond the obvious bodily advantages one had of it; the body becoming truly, in that case, but a quiet handmaid of the soul. ”

“ Had there been any intimacy between the native and the Emu, I might have been disposed to resort to this circumstance as an explanation; for some maintain that the human countenance partakes of the expression and even of the form of whatever, whether man or beast, it is in the habit of associating with. ”

“ There is not so foul thing under heaven as the human body. The body exudes grease, the eyes distil gums, the nose is full of mucus, the mouth of slobbering spittle; nor are these the most impure secretions of the body. ”

“ These seven million mouths must be fed daily and hourly. Their food is light and air. Man is not only fed and nourished through the portal of his mouth, but through all the pores of his body, by drawing in nutriment from the surrounding elements, even from the viewless air.
[Pg 765] These little mouths also need moisture. This fact is revealed to the senses through the medium of the nerves; for, how grateful to the dry, parched skin, is a bath of cold water! or, if the blood is in a “low state,”—impoverished by disease,—let it be a tepid bath. Let it feel comfortable and grateful to the user. ”

“ Nor is it difficult in their case to make up the full analogy 39 of a sense, as having an Object, an Organ, and a characteristic Sensation. In digestion, the object is the food, the organ is the alimentary canal; in respiration, the object is the air, and the organ the lungs. If it be said that the air is an impalpable agent and not discovered to the mind by its mode of operating, so is heat, the object of an admitted sense. ”

“ In the first Place, if the Body is to the Mind that which a Garment is to the Body, the Garment of Hercules informs us how much a Garment contributes to the Health of the Body, not to take any Notice of Colours of Hairs or of Skins. But as to that Question, whether one and the same Soul is capable of wearing out many Bodies, it shall be left to Pythagoras. Fa.If, according to Pythagoras, we could make Use of Change of Bodies, as we do of Apparel, it would be convenient to take a fat Body, and of a thick Texture, in Winter Time, and a thinner and lighter Body in Summer Time. ”

“ This minute germ of human life, this egg so small that a thousand could be laid upon a ten-cent piece, this atom, which under the microscope shows a speck of oil and albumin, which in the course of a few brief months is to constitute a complex human organism, with all the perfected parts and wonderful adjustment of a human body, already contains the elements of a new human soul. Embodied in this undeveloped human germ is the future man or woman. ”

“ On the part of the object we find natural immutation, as to place, in sound which is the object of hearing; for sound is caused by percussion and commotion of air: and we find natural immutation by alteration, in odor which is the object of smelling; for in order to exhale an odor, a body must be in a measure affected by heat. On the part of an organ, natural immutation takes place in touch and taste; for the hand that touches something hot becomes hot, while the tongue is moistened by the humidity of the flavored morsel. ”

“ I have thus shown the various classes of bodies as they are diversified by their forms and combinations and changes into one another, and now I must endeavour to set forth their affections and the causes of them. In the first place, the bodies which I have been describing are necessarily objects of sense. But we have not yet considered the origin of flesh, or what belongs to flesh, or of that part of the soul which is mortal. ”

“ The determinations of the highest universal essence of the bodily system are those fibres which are the simplest of all, and which are like rays of the soul, and the first designations of forms. The determinations of the lower universal essence are those fibres which are derived from the most simple ”

“ Again, in order to multiply emus, which are an important article of food, the men of the emu totem paint on the ground the sacred design of their totem, especially the parts of the emu which they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs. Round this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers, wearing head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly peering about in all directions. ”

“ I said: “I never saw the flesh of any person’s face like the flesh in the faces which that man paints. He reminds me of wax-work. Why does he paint the same waxy flesh in all four of his pictures? I don’t see the same colored flesh in all the faces about us.” ”

“ Emmy, if you desire to keep a Grantham and four horses, I surely may have my Lansdowne and two!
I feel walking against the wind, which is the only way I can express the feeling one has in parts of one’s life when matters go contrary. We are coming up in truly Scriptural style, for we know not where we shall eat, and where we shall drink, nor wherewithal we shall be clothed. ”

“ Some persons manufacture bleaching salts and oil of vitriol; others compouud the delicate odors which float upon the air of palaces, and radiate from the garments of refined women; yet both are chemists. And so of human bodies; they feed on the essences of food, and convert these essences into the most spiritual forms possible ”