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Strychnin given too frequently or in too large doses for a laboring heart can prevent its proper rest; the diastole is shortened and the relaxation of the heart is incomplete, its nutrition suffers, or even irregular and fibrillary contractions of a weak heart may apparently be caused.

Although the movement is cast for double chorus as regards the vocal part, the voices are given a subordinate place, the portrayal being carried on by the orchestra in true symphonic style. Notable in this movement is the rhythm. In all the storm and stress, a rhythmic motion, a systole and diastole, a surging to and fro, as of vast masses of beings in the last extremity of peril, is apparent.

Lydgate talked persistently when they were in his work-room, putting arguments for and against the probability of certain biological views; but he had none of those definite things to say or to show which give the waymarks of a patient uninterrupted pursuit, such as he used himself to insist on, saying that "there must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry," and that "a man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass."

When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of my spirit with the blood of divinity.

There are days also when countless medusae drift in beautiful veined creatures that throb like hearts, with perpetual systole and diastole of their diaphanous envelops: some, of translucent azure or rose, seem in the flood the shadows or ghosts of huge campanulate flowers; others have the semblance of strange living vegetables, great milky tubers, just beginning to sprout.

A kind of net-work, darker than the other parts of the wall, appears and vanishes alternately with every pulsation. This change of the colour of the wall he well ascribes to the compression of the retina by the diastole of the artery.

Nature outside man had taught him that life on all levels takes it course in a perpetual interplay of opposites, manifested externally in an interplay of diastole and systole comparable to the process of breathing.

Yet one other point about the views of Galen. He thought that both the contractions and dilatations of the heart what we call the 'systole' or contraction of the heart, and the 'diastole' or dilatation Galen thought that these were both active movements; that the heart actively dilated, so that it had a sort of sucking power upon the fluids which had access to it.

He says, "I like your late Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I also enure my penne sometimes in that kinde.... For the onely or chiefest hardnesse, whych seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the Number, as in Carpenter; the middle sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that draweth one legge after hir: and Heaven, being used shorte as one sillable, when it is in Verse stretched out with a Diastole, is like a lame dogge that holdes up one legge.

These things, therefore, happen together or at the same instant: the tension of the heart, the pulse of its apex, which is felt externally by its striking against the chest, the thickening of its parietes, and the forcible expulsion of the blood it contains by the constriction of its ventricles. Whence the motion which is generally regarded as the diastole of the heart, is in truth its systole.