through distance from our flesh and blood planet) in Comus. Pope has it,
and it is the daylight side of the night half obscuring Cowper. It is
only hostile to the priestly element, when that, by baleful swelling,
transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office: and then, in extreme
cases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils the lamp: as, for
example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere: at which
the dark angels may, but men do not laugh.

We have had comic pulpits, for a sign that the laughter-moving and the
worshipful may be in alliance: I know not how far comic, or how much
assisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness and the relief of its
appearance: at least they are popular, they are said to win the ear.
Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things; the scornful and
the brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by the
Comic spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree that
it enlivens. It enters you like fresh air into a study; as when one of
the sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like reassuring
daylight. You are cognizant of the true kind by feeling that you take it
in, savour it, and have what flowers live on, natural air for food. That
which you give out--the joyful roar--is not the better part; let that go
to good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs. Aristophanes promises
his auditors that if they will retain the ideas of the comic poet
carefully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their garments shall smell
odoriferous of wisdom throughout the year. The boast will not be thought
an empty one by those who have choice friends that have stocked
themselves according to his directions. Such treasuries of sparkling
laughter are wells in our desert. Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is a
step in civilization. To shrink from being an object of it is a step in
cultivation. We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter they
will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but we know likewise that the