when once reassured, to find in it a matter of delight.  Perhaps the mistake we make is to credit the Creative Spirit with human emotions; but, on the other hand, it is difficult to see how complex emotions, not connected with any material needs and impulses, can be found existing in organisms, unless the same emotions exist in the mind of their Creator.  If the thrush bursts into song on the bare bush at evening, if the child smiles to see the bulging hairy cactus, there must be, I think, something joyful and smiling at the heart, the inmost cell of nature, loving beauty and laughter; indeed, beauty and mirth must be the natural signs of health and content.  And then there strike in upon the mind two thoughts.  Is, perhaps, the basis of humour a kind of selfish security?  Does one primarily laugh at all that is odd, grotesque, broken, ill at ease, fantastic, because such things heighten the sense of one’s own health and security?  I do not mean that this is the flower of modern humour; but is it not, perhaps, the root?  Is not the basis of laughter perhaps the purely childish and selfish impulse to delight, not in the sufferings of others, but in the sense which all distorted things minister to one—­that one is temporarily, at least, more blest than they?  A child does not laugh for pure happiness—­when it is happiest, it is most grave and solemn; but when the sense of its health and soundness is brought home to it poignantly, then it laughs aloud, just as it laughs at the pleasant pain of being tickled, because the tiny uneasiness throws into relief its sense of secure well-being.

And the further thought—­a deep and strange one—­is this:  We see how all mortal things have a certain curve or cycle of life—­youth, maturity, age.  May not that law of being run deeper still? we think of nature being ever strong, ever young, ever joyful; but may not the very shadow of sorrow and suffering in the world be the sign that nature too grows old and weary?  May there have been a dim age, far back beyond history or fable or scientific record, when she, too, was young and light-hearted?  The sorrows of the world are at present not like the sorrows of age, but the sorrows of maturity.  There is no decrepitude in the world:  its heart is restless, vivid, and hopeful yet; its melancholy is as the melancholy of youth—­a melancholy deeply tinged with beauty; it is full of boundless visions and eager dreams; though it is thwarted, it believes in its ultimate triumph; and the growth of humour in the world may be just the shadow of hard fact falling upon the generous vision, for that is where humour resides; youth believes glowingly that all things are possible, but maturity sees that to hope is not to execute, and acquiesces smilingly in the incongruity between the programme and the performance.