Thus we read in Gen. xxi. 6, that Sarah, on the birth of Isaac, said “God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me,” and in Ps. cxxvi., “When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.  Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing.”  And in Proverbs we find, “There is a time to weep, and a time to laugh,” contrasting the expression of sorrow with that of pleasure.  Passing into Greek literature, we find laughter constantly termed “sweet.”  In Iliad xxi, “Saturn smiled sweetly at seeing his daughter;” in xxiii.  “The chiefs arose to throw the shield, and the Greeks laughed, i.e., with joy.”  In Odyssey, xx. 390, they prepare the banquet with laughter.  Od. xxii., 542, Penelope laughs at Telemachus sneezing, when she is talking of Ulysses’ return; she takes it for a good omen.  And in the Homeric Hymns, which, although inferior in date to the old Bard, are still among the earliest specimens of literature, we find, in that to Mercury, that the god laughs on beholding a tortoise, “thinking that he will make a beautiful lyre out of its shell;” and a little further on, Apollo laughs at hearing the sound of the lyre.  In the hymn to Aphrodite, the laughter-loving Venus laughed sweetly when she thought of men and mortals being intermarried.  The fact that this and the preceding kinds of laughter were not necessarily regarded as intellectual, is evident from the ancient poets attributing them to vegetable and inorganic life.  Considerable licence in personification must no doubt be conceded to those who went so far as to deify the elements, and to imagine a sort of soul in the universe, and no doubt language as well as feeling was not at the time strictly limited.  But it must be remarked that, while they rarely attribute laughter to the lower animals, they also never ascribe any other sign of emotion, nor even that in its higher kinds, to insensate matter.  In all these passages it is of a physical, or merely pleasurable description.  In Iliad xiv. 362, speaking of the Grecian host, Homer says that “the gleam of their armour was reflected to heaven, and all the earth around laughed at the brazen refulgence.”

In Hesiod’s Theogony, v. 40, we read that when the Muses are singing “the palace of loud-thundering Jove laughs (with delight) at their lily voice;” and in the Hymn to Ceres we find Proserpine beholding a Narcissus, from the root of which a hundred heads sprang forth “and the whole heavens were scented with its fragrance, and the whole earth laughed and the briny wave of the sea.”  Theognis writes that Delos, when Apollo was born, “was filled with the ambrosial odour, and the huge earth laughed.”  The poets seemed scarcely to have advanced beyond such a bold similitude, and we may conclude that while they saw in laughter something above the powers of the brute creation, they did not consider that it necessarily expressed the smallest exercise of intellect.