were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a
dissolution of the marriage.

I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability,
could never so much as understand the meaning of the word
POLITICS, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs from
Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask her about other
men or women and the chicanery of everyday existence - the
rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns - and you
will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay,
to make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a
share of the higher and more poetical understanding, frank
interest in things for their own sake, and enduring
astonishment at the most common. She is not to be deceived by
custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it is repeated.
I have heard her say she could wonder herself crazy over the
human eyebrow. Now in a world where most of us walk very
contentedly in the little lit circle of their own reason, and
have to be reminded of what lies without by specious and
clamant exceptions - earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius,
banjos floating in mid-air at a SEANCE, and the like - a mind
so fresh and unsophisticated is no despicable gift. I will
own I think it a better sort of mind than goes necessarily
with the clearest views on public business. It will wash. It
will find something to say at an odd moment. It has in it the
spring of pleasant and quaint fancies. Whereas I can imagine
myself yawning all night long until my jaws ached and the
tears came into my eyes, although my companion on the other
side of the hearth held the most enlightened opinions on the
franchise or the ballot.