that this tumult of images, illustrative or allusive, moves under any impulse or purpose of mirth.

It is but the coruscation of a restless understanding, often made ten times more so by the irritation of nerves, such as you will first learn to comprehend its how and its why some stage or two ahead. The image, the memorial, the record, which for me is derived from a palimpsest, as to one great fact in our human being, and which immediately I will show you, is but too repellent of laughter; or, even if laughter had been possible, it would have been such laughter as oftentimes is thrown off from the fields of ocean -- laughter that hides, or that seems to evade mustering tumult; foam-bells that weave garlands of phosphoric radiance for one moment round the eddies of gleaming abysses; mimicries of earth-born flowers that for the eye raise phantoms of gaiety, as often-times for the ear they raise echoes of fugitive laughter, mixing with the ravings and choir-voices of an angry sea.