and in Ps. cxxvi., "When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we
were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and
our tongue with singing." And in Proverbs we find, "There is a time to
weep, and a time to laugh," contrasting the expression of sorrow with
that of pleasure. Passing into Greek literature, we find laughter
constantly termed "sweet." In Iliad xxi, "Saturn smiled sweetly at
seeing his daughter;" in xxiii. "The chiefs arose to throw the shield,
and the Greeks laughed, _i.e._, with joy." In Odyssey, xx. 390, they
prepare the banquet with laughter. Od. xxii., 542, Penelope laughs at
Telemachus sneezing, when she is talking of Ulysses' return; she takes
it for a good omen. And in the Homeric Hymns, which, although inferior
in date to the old Bard, are still among the earliest specimens of
literature, we find, in that to Mercury, that the god laughs on
beholding a tortoise, "thinking that he will make a beautiful lyre out
of its shell;" and a little further on, Apollo laughs at hearing the
sound of the lyre. In the hymn to Aphrodite, the laughter-loving Venus
laughed sweetly when she thought of men and mortals being intermarried.
The fact that this and the preceding kinds of laughter were not
necessarily regarded as intellectual, is evident from the ancient poets
attributing them to vegetable and inorganic life. Considerable licence
in personification must no doubt be conceded to those who went so far as
to deify the elements, and to imagine a sort of soul in the universe,
and no doubt language as well as feeling was not at the time strictly
limited. But it must be remarked that, while they rarely attribute
laughter to the lower animals, they also never ascribe any other sign of
emotion, nor even that in its higher kinds, to insensate matter. In all
these passages it is of a physical, or merely pleasurable description.
In Iliad xiv. 362, speaking of the Grecian host, Homer says that "the
gleam of their armour was reflected to heaven, and all the earth around
laughed at the brazen refulgence."