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simile is not so unapt: nourishment is borne to my spirit through the air, often exactly as it is on the point of starvation.

Since I have loved thee, something unattainable floats in my spirit, a mystery which nourishes me. As the ripe fruits fall from the tree, so here thoughts fall to me, which refresh and invigorate me. O Goethe had the fountain a soul, it could not hasten more full of expectation on to light, to rise again, than I, with foreseeing certainty, hasten on to meet this new life, which has been given me through thee, and which gives me to know that a higher impulse of life will burst the prison, not sparing the rest and ease of accustomed days, which in fermenting inspiration it destroys. This lofty fate the loving spirit evades as little as the seed evades the blossom when it once lies in fresh earth. Thus I feel myself in thee, thou fruitful, blessed soil! I can say what it is when the germ bursts the hard rind, it is painful; the smiling children of spring are brought forth amid tears.

O Goethe, what happens with man? what does he feel? what happens in the most flaming cup of his heart? I would willingly confess my faults to thee, but love makes me quite an ideal being. Thou hast done much for me, even before thou knewest me; above much that I coveted and did not ask, thou hast raised me.

BETTINA.

THE LAST METAMORPHOSIS OF

MEPHISTOPHELES.

BY FRANK MARZIALS.

CANDID he is, and courteous therewithal,

Nor, as he once was wont, in the far prime,
Flashes his scorn to heaven;-

Of after-days, with antic bestial

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nor as the mime

Convenes the ape in man to carnival;·

Nor as the cynic of a later time

Jeers, that his laughter, like a jangled chime,
Rings through the abyss of our eternal fall.

But now, in courtliest tones of cultured grace,

He glories in the growth of good, his glance

Beaming benignant as he bids us trace.

Good everywhere-till, as mere motes that dance
Athwart the sunbeams, all things evil and base
Glint golden in his genial tolerance.

ON WIT.

BY SYDNEY SMITH.

[SYDNEY SMITH, preacher, lecturer, essayist, reformer, and wit, was born in Woodford, Essex, June 3, 1771. After graduating at Oxford he was for a short time curate of a parish in Wiltshire. Accepting a tutorship in Edinburgh, in 1798, he became the friend of Brougham, Jeffrey, and other writers; assisted in founding the Edinburgh Review (1802); was its first editor; and remained one of its chief contributors for twenty years. In 1803 he went to London, where he soon became famous for his lectures and sermons; held livings at Foston-le-Clay and Combe-Florey; and in 1831 was made canon residentiary of St. Paul's. His chief works are: "Peter Plymley's Letters" (1807-1808) and "Wit and Wisdom" (1856), edited by Duyckinck. He died in London, February 22, 1845.]

To begin at the beginning of this discussion, it is plain that wit concerns itself with the relations which subsist between our ideas and the first observation which occurs to any man turning his attention to this subject is that it cannot, of course, concern itself with all the relations which subsist between all our ideas; for then every proposition would be witty; - The rain wets me through-Butter is spread upon bread- would be propositions replete with mirth; and the moment the mind observed the plastic and diffusible nature of butter, and the excellence of bread as a substratum, it would become enchanted with this flash of facetiousness. Therefore, the first limit to be affixed to that observation of relations which produces the feeling of wit is that they must be relations which excite surprise. If you tell me that all men must die, I am very little struck with what you say, because it is not an assertion very remarkable for its novelty; but if you were to say that man was like a time glass that both must run out, and both render up their dust, I should listen to you with more attention, because I should feel something like surprise at the sudden relation you had struck out between two such apparently dissimilar ideas as a man and a time glass.

Surprise is so essential an ingredient of wit, that no wit

will bear repetition at least the original electrical feeling produced by any piece of wit can never be renewed. There is a sober sort of approbation succeeds at hearing it the second time, which is as different from its original rapid, pungent volatility, as a bottle of champagne that has been open three days is from one that has at that very instant emerged from the darkness of the cellar. To hear that the top of Mont Blanc is like an umbrella, though the relation be new to me, is not sufficient to excite surprise; the idea is so very obvious, it is so much within the reach of the most ordinary understandings, that I can derive no sort of pleasure from the comparison. The relation discovered must be something remote from all the common tracks and sheep walks made in the mind; it must not be a comparison of color with color, and figure with figure, or any comparison which, though individually new, is specifically stale, and to which the mind has been in the habit of making many similar; but it must be something removed from common apprehension, distant from the ordinary haunts of thought-things which are never brought together in the common events of life, and in which the mind has discovered relations by its own subtilty and quickness.

Now, then, the point we have arrived at, at present, in building up our definition of wit, is that it is the discovery of those relations in ideas which are calculated to excite surprise. But a great deal must be taken away from this account of wit before it is sufficiently accurate; for, in the first place, there must be no feeling or conviction of the utility of the relation so discovered. If you go to see a large cotton mill, the manner in which the large water wheel below works the little parts of the machinery seven stories high, the relation which one bears to another, is extremely surprising to a person unaccustomed to mechanics; but, instead of feeling as you feel at a piece of wit, you are absorbed in the contemplation of the utility and importance of such relations - there is a sort of rational approbation mingled with your surprise, which makes the whole feeling very different from that of wit. At the same time, if we attend very accurately to our feelings, we shall perceive that the discovery of any surprising relation whatever produces some slight sensation of wit. When first the manner in which a steam engine opens and shuts its own valves is explained to me, or when I at first perceive the ingenious and complicated contrivances of any piece of machinery, the surprise that I feel

VOL. XXI.- -6

at the discovery of these connections has always something in it which resembles the feeling of wit, though that is very soon extinguished by others of a very different nature. Children, who view the different parts of a machine not so much with any notions of its utility, feel something still more like the sensation of wit when first they perceive the effect which one part produces upon another. Show a child of six years old that, by moving the treadle of a knife grinder's machine, you make the large wheel turn round, or that by pressing the spring of a repeating watch you make the watch strike, and you probably raise up a feeling in the child's mind precisely similar to that of wit. There is a mode of teaching children geography by disjointed parts of a wooden map, which they fit together. I have no doubt that the child, in finding the kingdom or republic which fits into a great hole in the wooden sea, feels exactly the sensation of wit. Every one must remember that fitting the inviting projection of Crim Tartary into the Black Sea was one of the greatest delights of their childhood; and almost all children are sure to scream with pleasure at the discovery.

The relation between ideas which excite surprise, in order to be witty, must not excite any feeling of the beautiful. "The good man," says a Hindu epigram, "goes not upon enmity, but rewards with kindness the very being who injures him. So the sandalwood, while it is felling, imparts to the edge of the ax its aromatic flavor." Now here is a relation which would be witty if it were not beautiful: the relation discovered betwixt the falling sandalwood, and the returning good for evil, is a new relation which excites surprise; but the mere surprise at the relation is swallowed up by the contemplation of the moral beauty of the thought, which throws the mind into a more solemn and elevated mood than is compatible with the feeling of wit.

It would not be a difficult thing to do (and if the limits of my lecture allowed I would do it), to select from Cowley and Waller a suite of passages, in order to show the effect of the beautiful in destroying the feeling of wit, and vice versa. First, I would take a passage purely witty, in which the mind merely contemplated the singular and surprising relation of the ideas: next, a passage where the admixture of some beautiful sentiment the excitation of some slight moral feeling- arrested the mind from the contemplation of the relation between the

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ideas; then, a passage in which the beautiful overpowered still more the facetious, till, at last, it was totally destroyed.

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If the relation between the ideas, to produce wit, must not be mingled with the beautiful, still less must they be so with the sublime. In that beautiful passage in Mr. Campbell's poem of "Lochiel," the wizard repeats these verses which were in every one's mouth when first the poem was written : Lochiel Lochiel! though my eyes I should seal, Man cannot keep secret what God would reveal; 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, And coming events cast their shadows before.

Now this comparison of the dark, uncertain sort of prescience of future events implied by the gift of second sight, and the notice of an approaching solid body by the previous approach of its shadow, contains a new and striking relation; but it is not witty, nor would it ever have been considered as witty, if expressed in a more concise manner, and with the rapidity of conversation, because it inspires feelings of a much higher cast than those of wit, and, instead of suffering the mind to dwell upon the mere relation of ideas, fills it with a sort of mysterious awe, and gives an air of sublimity to the fabulous power of prediction. Every one knows the Latin line on the miracle at the marriage supper in Cana of Galilee on the conversion of water into wine. The poet says,

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The modest water saw its God, and blushed!

Now, in my mind, that sublimity which some persons discover in this passage is destroyed by its wit; it appears to me witty, and not sublime. I have no great feelings excited by it, and can perfectly well stop to consider the mere relation of ideas. I hope I need not add that the line, if it produce the effect of a witty conceit, and not of a sublime image, is perfectly misplaced and irreverent: the intent, however, of the poet, was undoubtedly to be serious. In the same manner, whenever the mind is not left to the mere surprise excited by the relation of ideas, but when that relation excites any powerful emotion—as those of the sublime and beautiful, or any high passion-as anger or pity, or any train of reflections upon the utility of the relations, the feeling of wit is always diminished or destroyed. It seems to be occasioned by those relations of ideas which excite surprise, and surprise alone. Whenever relations excite any other

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