beauty poured out over the whole creation. But what a rough, unsightly
sketch of Nature should we be entertained with, did all her colouring
disappear, and the several distinctions of light and shade vanish! In
short, our souls are delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing
delusion, and we walk about like the enchanted hero of a romance, who
sees beautiful castles, woods, and meadows, and at the same time hears
the warbling of birds and the purling of streams; but upon the finishing
of some secret spell, the fantastic scene breaks up, and the
disconsolate knight finds himself on a barren heath, or in a solitary
desert."

I have introduced these considerations, because it is very difficult for
us to realize that what we behold is merely phenomenal, that

"Things are not what they seem;"

but that we are looking into the mirror of Nature at our own likeness.
When we speak of a ludicrous occurrence, we cannot avoid thinking that
the external events themselves contain something of that character.
Thus, the ludicrous has come in our ideas and language to be separated
from the sense in which alone it exists, and it is desirable that we
should clearly understand that the distinction is only logical and not
real.

When the cause of our laughter--be it mind, matter, or imaginary
circumstance--is merely regarded as something incongruous and amusing,
we name it the ludicrous, and a man is called ludicrous as faulty or
contemptible. But when the cause of it is viewed as something more than
this, as coming from some conscious power or tendency within us--a
valuable gift and an element in our mental constitution--we call it