'Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.'

Even the Hindoos, those earliest _literati_ of the young earth, whose
eyes peered first into the intricate machinery of Being, and brought
therefrom strange and glowing and miraculous impressions of its
mechanical appliances,--strong levers that men use now for
criticism,--recognized this element. Afar from the scene of their
sorrow, in the lotos a-bloom on Vishnu's head, they beheld the primitive
Humor, the laughter of infinite Strength springing from bar to bar in
the great gymnasium of life. Thus we read in the Cosmogony of Menu,--

'Numerous world-developments there are, creation and extermination;
_Sportively_ he produces either, the highest Creator for ever and ever.'

And says the more orthodox Schlegel, 'Nature was in its origin naught
else than a beautiful image, a pure emanation, a wonderful creation, a
_sport_ of omnipotent love.' And Schiller, whom an impregnable
aristocracy of soul shut out from the ranks of humorists, who rode in
his coupee, three feet above the level of the common stream of humanity,
and never drifted with its tide, yet, with clear-eyed insight into the
passions he did not share, acknowledged the _Spieltrieb_ as the highest
possibility of man's nature. 'The last perfection of our faculties,' he
says, 'is, that their activity, without ceasing to be sure and earnest,
becomes _sport_.

Emerson's humor is peculiar to himself. It is not the massive, exuberant
play of Jean Paul. He does not challenge the slow-riding moon to a
cricket match, nor hurl the stars from their orbits in his mad game in
the skies. Neither has he the brusque but more solid geniality of
Lessing. Imagination fails him for the one, and a strong power of logic
for the other. But he tears the clouds of ignorance and prejudice that
are beneath his feet into ribbons and sends them streaming through
space, filmy banners of blue and white, heavily charged with the
electricity of his enfranchised thought, and illumines the world with
the lightnings of their chance collision. His humor is rather latent
than striking. It does not gleam through showy words, the paraphernalia
of a harlequinade, but peeps out from the homeliest phrases, and
convulses some simple law of our nature with laughter at its own
grotesqueness. Formerly, imprisoned as it was within unyielding limits,
it was as imposing as a miniature Gothic cathedral in a dark cave, but
now the queen-rose of the archit