Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/51

 Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged. This world of ours by tacit pact is pledged To laying such a spangled fabric low, Whether by gradual brush or gallant blow."

Beauty has spun the poet and the insect into a cocoon out of which the splendid wings emerge; then wit takes up the thread with the conception of the prosaic old world's hostility to flimsy poesy, and we admire the sudden congruity which is established between two such irreconcilable objects.

Outside the domain of poetry involuntary wit lurks everywhere, even in passages of history whose passion seems capable of expunging all smiles upon the face. Two contrarious ideas may blend for a moment at one point, as when King Olaf put a pan of coals upon Eyvind's naked flesh until it broiled beneath them, and then asked, without suspecting any thing incongruous, "Dost thou now, O Eyvind, believe in Christ?" Here is a momentary inclusion of an act of belief under an act of physical pain. When in the course of time the deadly earnestness of Olaf fades away for us, we perceive the incongruity, but also perceive that Olaf, in sad simplicity, imagined there was congruity; or, he reflected, a pan of coals shall compel a congruity.

This grim practice of unconscious wit is heightened when we recollect that Christ was a person who declined to call down fire upon those who did not receive him; and such an incident affords us a ready passage from Wit into the domain of Irony.