ence in us dwell;
That mind and soul according well
May make one music as before,
But vaster."

Before taking leave of Dr. Cumming, let us express a hope that we have in
no case exaggerated the unfavorable character of the inferences to be
drawn from his pages. His creed often obliges him to hope the worst of
men, and exert himself in proving that the worst is true; but thus far we
are happier than he. We have no theory which requires us to attribute
unworthy motives to Dr. Cumming, no opinions, religious or irreligious,
which can make it a gratification to us to detect him in delinquencies.
On the contrary, the better we are able to think of him as a man, while
we are obliged to disapprove him as a theologian, the stronger will be
the evidence for our conviction, that the tendency toward good in human
nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which
insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic
perversions.

IV. GERMAN WIT: HENRY HEINE. {99}

"Nothing," says Goethe, "is more significant of men's character than what
they find laughable." The truth of this observation would perhaps have
been more apparent if he had said _culture_ instead of character. The
last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar
is their jocularity; and we can hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide
gulf which separates him from them, than by comparing the object which
shakes the diaphragm of a coal-heaver with the highly complex pleasure
derived from a real witticism. That any high order of wit is exceedingly
complex, and demands a ripe and strong mental development, has one
evidence in the fact that we do not find it in boys at all in proportion
to their manifestation of other powers. Clever boys generally aspire to
the heroic and poetic rather than the comic, and the crudest of all their
efforts are their jokes. Many a witty man will remember how in his
school days a practical joke, more or less Rabelaisian, was for him the
_ne plus ultra_ of the ludicrous. It seems to have been the same with
the boyhood of the human race. The history and literature of the ancient
Hebrews gives the idea of a people who went about their business and
their pleasure as gravely as a society of beavers; the smile and the
laugh are often mentioned metaphorically, but the smile is one of
complacency, the laugh is one of scorn. Nor can we imagine that the
facetious ele