Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 | Page 2

altogether unknown in babyhood;
in boyhood, it exists only in its rudiments; and it does not reach its full
development till adolescence ripens into manhood.

This train of thought was suggested to us a few evenings ago, by the
conduct of a party of eight or ten individuals, who meet periodically for
the purpose of philosophical inquiry. Their subject is a very grave one.
Their object is to mould into a science that which as yet is only a vague,
formless, and obscure department of knowledge; and they proceed in
the most cautious manner from point to point, from axiom to
axiom--debating at every step, and coming to no decision without
unanimous conviction. Some are professors of the university, devoted
to abstruse studies; some are clergymen; and some authors and artists.
Now, at the meeting in question--which we take merely as an example,
for all are alike--when the hour struck which terminates their
proceedings for the evening, the jaded philosophers retired to the
refreshment-room; and here a scene of remarkable contrast occurred.
Instead of a single deep, low, earnest voice, alternating with a profound
silence, an absolute roar of merriment began, with the suddenness of an
explosion of gunpowder. Jests, bon-mots, anecdotes, barbarous plays
upon words--the more atrocious the better--flew round the table; and a
joyous and almost continuous ha! ha! ha! made the ceiling ring. This,
we venture to say it, was laughter--genuine, unmistakable laughter,
proceeding from no sense of triumph, from no self-gratulation, and
mingled with no bad feeling of any kind. It was a spontaneous effort of
nature, coming from the head as well as the heart: an unbending of the
bow, a reaction from study, which study alone could occasion, and
which could occur only in adult life.
There are some people who cannot laugh, but these are not necessarily
either morose or stupid. They may laugh in their heart, and with their
eyes, although by some unlucky fatality, they have not the gift of oral
cachinnation. Such persons are to be pitied; for laughter in grown
people is a substitute devised by nature for the screams and shouts of
boyhood, by which the lungs are strengthened and the health preserved.
As the intellect ripens, that shouting ceases, and we learn to laugh as
we learn to reason. The society we have mentioned studied the harder
the more they laughed, and they laughed the more the harder they
studied. Each, of course, to be of use, must be in its own place. A laugh
in the midst of the study would have been a profanation; a grave look in
the midst of the merriment would have been an insult to the good sense

of the company.
If there are some people who cannot laugh, there are others who will
not. It is not, however, that they are ashamed of being grown men, and
want to go back to babyhood, for by some extraordinary perversity,
they fancy unalterable gravity to be the distinguishing characteristic of
wisdom. In a merry company, they present the appearance of a Red
Indian whitewashed, and look on at the strange ways of their
neighbours without betraying even the faintest spark of sympathy or
intelligence. These are children of a larger growth, and have not yet
acquired sense enough to laugh. Like the savage, they are afraid of
compromising their dignity, or, to use their own words, of making fools
of themselves. For our part, we never see a man afraid of making a fool
of himself at the right season, without setting him down as a fool ready
made.
A woman has no natural grace more bewitching than a sweet laugh. It
is like the sound of flutes on the water. It leaps from her heart in a clear,
sparkling rill; and the heart that hears it feels as if bathed in the cool,
exhilarating spring. Have you ever pursued an unseen fugitive through
the trees, led on by her fairy laugh; now here, now there--now lost, now
found? We have. And we are pursuing that wandering voice to this day.
Sometimes it comes to us in the midst of care, or sorrow, or irksome
business; and then we turn away, and listen, and hear it ringing through
the room like a silver bell, with power to scare away the ill spirits of the
mind. How much we owe to that sweet laugh! It turns the prose of our
life into poetry; it flings showers of sunshine over the darksome wood
in which we are travelling; it touches with light even our sleep, which
is no more the image of death, but gemmed with dreams that are the
shadows of immortality.
But our song, like Dibdin's, 'means more than it says;' for a man, as we
have stated, may laugh, and yet the cachinnation