Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/22

 and have association of ideas concerning each other and the outer world, we come near to that human quality which is the ground of the function of laughter. These mental traits are the buried roots of the consciousness which blossoms into smiles in the sun of wit and humor. For the power to combine or to contrast two or more objects, to remember one absent object by another present one, to experience a feeling that two objects are associated, leads to the highest manifestations of wit. In the delicate structures of men and women, which are bequests to them descending through the whole inviolate entail of Nature, refined by it and amplified till they entertain keenly the pathos of life, all mental traits accumulate into the faculty of imagination, upon which every thing that is laughable depends.

With this faculty man makes shift to relieve the moments when existence, with its incessant toil and merciless persistency of routine, threatens to become insupportable. One day is not exactly like another, if hearty laughter loosens its handcuffs and lets the prisoner stretch his frame and have a little run. Every laugh reddens the blood, which goes then more blithely to dissipate the fogs of a moody brain. Multitudes of our American brains are badly drained in consequence of a settling of the wastage of house-grubbing and street-work into moral morasses which generate many a chimera. So there is something positively heroic in the hilarity which braves, light-armed as it is, our brood of viperous cares, and attacks their den. One flash of a smile shears off Medusa's head with impunity.