Laughter, after all, is a kind of explosion, which it is impossible to exercise without restraint and preserve the Ideal. Another example of this laughter, which is nothing but laughter, occurs in a duet of Weber's "Oberon," throughout which we are in a continual state of anxiety for the prima donna's throat and lungs. How very differently the inextinguishable laughter of the gods affects us in Homer, a sound which breaks from the blessed repose of divinity, and rather expresses gladsome serenity than abstract and wanton abandonment. Just as little ought weeping, devoid of all restraint, to be introduced into the ideal work of art, of such a kind as that we may hear in all its comfortlessness in another part of the "Freischütz." And speaking generally, in music singing must take to itself the kind of joy and rapture which we catch from the lark in the open sky. Shrieking, whether of pain or delight, is not music at all. Even in the expression of suffering the sweet tones of the plaint must penetrate and clarify the sorrows, so that it continually may seem to us worth all the suffering to arrive at such sweetness of plaint in its expression. And this is the sweetness of melody, the singing of every kind of art. (_γ_) Regarded in a certain relation to this fundamental axiom of art we may find some justification for the principle of irony in its modern sense; but it must not be overlooked that irony is frequently destitute of all real seriousness, and is particularly prone to expatiate over bad subject-matter; and, in another aspect of it, it is apt to run to seed in the mere yearning of emotion rather than actively participate in practical life, as is proved by the case of Novalis, one of the finer temperaments who have made this point of view their own, and for lack of definite interest, or through shrinking from the real world, are driven up and down, and cajoled into this sort of spiritual consumption. This is the kind of yearning which will not descend to mere practical business and production, because it is afraid of soiling itself with the contact of finite things, although it already secretly feels the defects of such exclusion. No doubt we find in irony that absolute principle of negativity, in which the subject of consciousness becomes self-centred through the annihilation of definite relations and particulars; but in this case the act of annihilation of definite relations and particulars, as we have already pointed out when discussing the principle, is not, as in comedy, essentially in its right place, simply exposing its own want of substance, but is directed quite as often against everything else excellent in itself and of sterling worth. Whether we regard irony, then, as this art of universal destruction, or as the yearning of which we have spoken in contrast with the true Ideal, it betrays a secret lack of proportion and restraint which is detrimental to the artist. Substantive form is