But laughter! This earthquake which invisible powers heave up out of the knotty entanglement of our dark enigmatical being! which in boisterous senseless noises announces that within, in the unseen world, the soul neither recks of nor knows truth or falsehood, and has just been murdering the innocent herald who was bringing these phantasms before it! These rude unmeaning sounds which will for a long time distort even the best face, the most mechanically regular mask! How men long after this loathsome convulsion! While tears lie and cheat by aping heavenly feelings, laughter is awkwardly trying to let the craziness of evil demons skulk behind it, hides itself from vulgarity for the sake of being seen, feigns terrour when our unsubdued struggling feelings are detected, and saunters about in the midst of whatever is disgusting and impure, perpetually clapperclawing with some outcast among the rabble or other: one moment our intelligent, and higher faculties, as they call them, get the upper hand; the next they are beaten down and trod upon by something base and profligate: and thus veering to and fro, now toying now scolding, laughter clatters down the steps of idiocy, which crumble with the decay of our bodily strength ... and man grins, and is happy. Blessed time, when there was a real existence, a life in life! when the vast whole of eternity, being sufficient to itself, had not splintered itself out into time! when the spirit did not need a succession, measured out by the atoms of time and space, to become conscious of its power and of its being! What a portentous event was it, when eternity and life parted fellowship!--when the band by which spirits were bound in one, burst, and that strange creature, Death, rusht in through the chasm to domineer over all. Now that which is firm, stedfast, enduring, has concentrated itself in the depths of its own being, and has put on the unvarying aspect of solid meditation. Stones, rocks, metals, bid defiance to decay with their cold looks, and would make believe that they know not of change. Drops of water dancing like tiny elves along them, the sightless legions of the air, wherever they spread, are eating into the limbs of the rigid haughty giant; the dwarf, man, digs into his bones, and, if his strength were equal to his fury, would reduce him to fleeting sand. May it not peradventure be the same with the eternal stars? A little acid, and the monster sneezes sillily, and roars, and yawns, and for the moment remembers its spiritual nature.