HEART, THE HUMAN
An American naturalist tells us that the human brain is full of birds. The song-birds might all have been hatched in the human heart, so well do they express the whole gamut of human passion and emotion in their varied songs. The plaintive singers, the soaring ecstatic singers, the gushing singers, the inarticulate singers—robin, dove, lark, mocking-bird, nightingale—all are expressive of human emotion, desire, love, sadness, aspiration, glee. Christ gives a sadder view of our heart, showing it to be “the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.” Fierce hawk, croaking raven, ravenous vulture, obscene birds, birds of discord, birds of darkness, birds of tempest, birds of blood and death—these are all typical of the heart’s base passions; these all brood and nestle within, and fly forth to darken, pollute, and destroy. And the Master is not here speaking of some hearts, but of the human heart generally. In the woods we find occasionally a bird with a false note, in the fields a misshapen flower, yet beauty and music are the prevailing characteristics of the landscape; but stepping into society, the universal discord and misery declare the common radical defect of our nature.—W. L. Watkinson, “The Transfigured Sackcloth.”
(1370)
HEART, THE SINGING
Frank L. Stanton writes of the man who has a song in the heart thus:
There is never a sky of winter
To the heart that sings alway;
Never a night but hath stars to light,
And dreams of a rosy day.
The world is ever a garden