“’T was partly love and partly fear,
   And partly ’t was a bashful art,
   That I might rather feel than see
   The swelling of her heart’

“Always the heart, whether its hurried action is seen, or heard, or felt.  But it is not always in this way that the ‘deceitful’ organ treats the lover.

  “‘Faint heart never won fair lady.’

“This saying was not meant, perhaps, to be taken literally, but it has its literal truth.  Many a lover has found his heart sink within him,—­lose all its force, and leave him weak as a child in his emotion at the sight of the object of his affections.  When Porphyro looked upon Madeline at her prayers in the chapel, it was too much for him: 

  “’She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest,
   Save wings, for heaven:—­Porphyro grew faint,
   She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from earthly taint.’

“And in Balzac’s novel, ‘Cesar Birotteau,’ the hero of the story ’fainted away for-joy at the moment when, under a linden-tree, at Sceaux, Constance-Barbe-Josephine accepted him as her future husband.’

“One who faints is dead if he does not I come to,’ and nothing is more likely than that too susceptible lovers have actually gone off in this way.  Everything depends on how the heart behaves itself in these and similar trying moments.  The mechanism of its actions becomes an interesting subject, therefore, to lovers of both sexes, and to all who are capable of intense emotions.

“The heart is a great reservoir, which distributes food, drink, air, and heat to every part of the system, in exchange for its waste material.  It knocks at the gate of every organ seventy or eighty times in a minute, calling upon it to receive its supplies and unload its refuse.  Between it and the brain there is the closest relation.  The emotions, which act upon it as we have seen, govern it by a mechanism only of late years thoroughly understood.  This mechanism can be made plain enough to the reader who is not afraid to believe that he can understand it.

“The brain, as all know, is the seat of ideas, emotions, volition.  It is the great central telegraphic station with which many lesser centres are in close relation, from which they receive, and to which they transmit, their messages.  The heart has its own little brains, so to speak,—­small collections of nervous substance which govern its rhythmical motions under ordinary conditions.  But these lesser nervous centres are to a large extent dominated by influences transmitted from certain groups of nerve-cells in the brain and its immediate dependencies.

“There are two among the special groups of nerve-cells which produce directly opposite effects.  One of these has the power of accelerating the action of the heart, while the other has the power of retarding or arresting this action.  One acts as the spur, the other as the bridle.  According as one or the other predominates, the action of the heart will be stimulated or restrained.  Among the great modern discoveries in physiology is that of the existence of a distinct centre of inhibition, as the restraining influence over the heart is called.