POETICAL LECTURE ON ANATOMY.
Reading edition
The following is the purport of a lecture on anatomy. The lecturer is represented as taking up the human skull, containing the brain and its appendages, with the nervous cords exposed to observation, and with “apostrophic eye” proceeding:—
This is the tenement of thought, The mansion of the mind, Whose empire, as the universe, Is boundless undefined! ’Tis vaulted, like the evening sky In star-wrought grace unfurl’d, And like that very firmament, Hangs o’er a breathing world— A world of thought, a world of sense, A world of passion, pride, Reason, perception, hope, love, light, In glory side by side! Here gather, too, in crowded thrall Of agile grace and hue, Imagination’s thousand forms Fast thronging on the view. Here reason reigns, here genius dwells, And here ambition lives! And brightest ’mid that mighty throng, The soul immortal thrives. Here, too, imperial will resides In regal state enshrined, In stern dominion over all, With majesty combined! Mark this! it is his messenger, That, like electric fire, Swift-wing’d, the mandate beareth forth Of reason or desire. This filament, this very thread, Hath power to shake the frame; That, whispering to the heart’s warm core, To light love’s genial flame. And THIS, or THIS, to sense inclined, Hath magic in its spell, To waken pleasure, pain, or hope, And rapture’s story tell. And this small cord sent to the eye, Can comprehend the whole— The limitless, the vast profound, Where worlds unnumbered roll! That, to the tongue can captivate, This, epicures enslave, That, to the same makes slander rife, And THIS perchance a knave. That, to the ear, oft makes the soul Quake ’neath the thunder’s peal, Or to the heart, with genius warm’d, A dream’s low tones reveal. Concenter’d in one mass, this brain, These make man what he is, The offspring of yon world of light, The life and soul of this. —From an American work.
The River St John, in New Brunswick.—In this river there are several falls, not downwards, as in the ordinary course of rivers, but upwards against the current. The River St John is of the size of the Rhine. It drains a large portion of the province of New Brunswick. The mass of water it discharges into the Bay of Fundy is prodigious, especially during the spring floods, when the tides rise to the height of 35, 50, and sometimes even 60 feet, above the ordinary level. The remarkable fall of the water backwards is produced by the enormous volume of water, occupying a channel in some places ten miles in breadth, being confined near St John’s into a breadth of 300 yards, which occasions it to roll back impetuously in the form of a magnificent cascade.
Children of the Poor.—Charles Lamb has truly and touchingly remarked, that common people’s children “are dragged up, not brought up.” There is a precocity—not, indeed, of intellect, but of prudence and worldly wisdom—in them, that is truly painful. Care has usurped the empire of carelessness, that legitimate monarch of a child’s being; and like all usurpers, has in the vehemence of his achievements anticipated the slow march of Time. Life itself, which among the children of the rich is an exuberant overflowing, that, lavish it as they may, still seems inexhaustible, among those of the poor is a lean phantom, grasped at with pain and maintained with a struggle; in short, they know nothing of youth but its feebleness and its wailing; its bloom and its buoyancy being, like every other luxury, beyond their reach. To me the most painful sight in this world is a poor, that is, a destitute child. Whatever misery a grown-up person may be plunged into, a thousand suppositions are left for its palliation: they may once have been well off, or they may have been the artificers of their own ruin, and they may live to see better days: but children—they can have done nothing to deserve that the one blessing unmortgaged at the Fall, the carelessness of youth, should be taken from them.—Lady Bulwer.