Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/210

 disappears, swallowed in the quicksand of the king's lunacy. Kingdom, friends, reason, family, are all crumbled into this wreck of an old father, who pretends at last to hear the soft and gentle voice which used to temper the pride of his state and keep him human: he comes in to us hugging the hanged Cordelia to his cracking heart, to feel that she will come no more; she, whom he drove from his palace gate with violent misapprehension, will come no more,—never, never, never! Oh, it has grown too piteous for the wisest Fool: he can never share these scenes; his humor cannot lace these thundrous lines. Do they swell to the measure of the firmament itself, or is it our heart which is swelling to occupy that space? Yes: "Pray ye, undo this button." It is the heart, too big for any thing that ever made it smile. The lightnings of fate rend it into the drops of pity, and they wash all tolerating smiles away.

Humor is too deeply implicated with our mortality, too warm a comrade, too judicious a friend in our extremities, to choose such hours of disaster to virtue for any task of reconciliation. Awful and questioning spirits come; and Humor, yielding to them our hand, stands aside to wait, but yields it warm enough to keep warm through any grasp till it may be claimed again.

Shakspeare's instinct divined the precise moment when the bells of the Fool's bauble could not compete with thunder, nor the balls upon his cap draw off the bolt. But, while the muttering comes up from the horizon and begins to be heard between the lines, the bells still shake, as in the last scene of the first act, where