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It has been long known to the people of the East that there is an intimate connection between brain and lung action, and modern experiment has shown by means of the spirometer that the systole and diastole motion of the hemispheres of the brain coincide exactly with the respiration of the lungs. The brain as the organ of the mind registers every emotion with unerring precision.

Every thing that is his, his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments, fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth. Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

They may be seen in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the alternate activity and passivity of the lungs; in the feet of the pedestrian, one pausing while the other proceeds; in the waving wings of birds; in the undulation of the sea; in the creation and propagation of sound, and the propagation, at least, of light; in the alternate acceleration and retardation of the earth's motion in its orbit, and in the waving of its poles.

For I could neither rightly perceive at first when the systole and when the diastole took place, nor when and where dilatation and contraction occurred, by reason of the rapidity of the motion, which in many animals is accomplished in the twinkling of an eye, coming and going like a flash of lightning; so that the systole presented itself to me now from this point, now from that; the diastole the same; and then everything was reversed, the motions occurring, as it seemed, variously and confusedly together.

In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and it was with a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage to that perennial fountain. Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same systole and diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in my own heart, I looked upon their giant mechanism.

The immediate following second rise not so high as that of the auricular contraction is known as the ventricular wave, and corresponds to the dicrotic wave in the radial. The next lesser decline shows ventricular diastole, or the heart rest. A tracing of the jugular vein shows the activity of the right side of the heart.

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.

The spiritual things of the Word are like the breathing of the lungs, its celestial things are like the systole and diastole of the heart, and its natural things are like the pleura, the diaphragm, and the ribs, with the moving fibers attached, by which the motions are made reciprocal.

Tumultuous rushing o'er the outstretched plains; A wildered maze of comets and of suns; The blood of changeless God that ever runs With quick diastole up the immortal veins; A phantom host that moves and works in chains; A monstrous fiction which, collapsing, stuns The mind to stupor and amaze at once; A tragedy which that man best explains Who rushes blindly on his wild career With trampling hoofs and sound of mailed war, Who will not nurse a life to win a tear, But is extinguished like a falling star: Such will at times this life appear to me, Until I learn to read more perfectly.

There is a thing deader than a door-nail, viz., Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I. Dead, more dead, most dead, is Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I.; and this upon more arguments than one. The book has clearly not completed its elementary act of respiration; the systole of Vol. I. is absolutely useless and lost without the diastole of that Vol. II., which is never to exist.