standing, when not suffused with some glow of
sympathetic emotion or some touch of mysticism, gives but a dry,
crude image of the world. The quality of wit inspires more
admiration than confidence. It is a merit we should miss little in
any one we love.

The same principle, however, can have more sentimental
embodiments. When our substitutions are brought on by the
excitement of generous emotion, we call wit inspiration. There is
the same finding of new analogies, and likening of disparate things;
there is the same transformation of our apperception. But the
brilliancy is here not only penetrating, but also exalting. For
instance:

Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awakened from the dream of life:
'Tis we that wrapped in stormy visions keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife.

There is here paradox, and paradox justified by reflection. The poet
analyzes, and analyzes without reserve. The dream, the storm, the
phantoms, and the unprofitableness could easily make a satirical
picture. But the mood is transmuted; the mind takes an upward
flight, with a sense of liberation from the convention it dissolves,
and of freer motion in the vagueness beyond. The disintegration of
our ideal here leads to mysticism, and because of this effort
towards transcendence, the brilliancy becomes sublime.

_Humour._

Sec. 63. A different mood can give a different direction to the same
processes. The sympathy by which we reproduce the feeling of
another, is always very much opposed to the aesthetic attitude to
which the whole world is merely a stimulus to our sensibility. In
the tragic, we have seen how the sympathetic feeling, by which
suffering is appreciated and shared, has to be overlaid by many
incidental aesthetic pleasures, if the resulting effect is to be on the
whole good. We have also seen how the only way in which the
ridiculous can be kept within the sphere of the aesthetically good is
abstracting it from its relations, and treating it as an independent
and curious stimulus; we should stop laughing and begin to be
annoyed if we tried to make sense out of our absurdity. The less
sympathy we have with men the more exquisite is our enjoyment
of their folly: satirical delight is closely akin to cruelty. Defect and
mishap stimulate our fancy, as blood and tortures excite in us the
passions of the beast of prey. The more this inhuman attitude
yields to sympathy and reason, th