f 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 be wanting. His
heart laughs, and his eyes are filled with that kindly, sympathetic
smile which inspires friendship and confidence. On the sympathy
within, these external phenomena depend; and this sympathy it is which
keeps societies of men together, and is the true freemasonry of the
good and wise. It is an imperfect sympathy that grants only
sympathetic tears: we must join in the mirth as