For wit, this strange, queer, lovely being is fully equal to Beatrice, yet nowise resembling her.  A soft, subtile, nimble essence, consisting in one knows not what, and springing up one can hardly tell how, her wit neither stings nor burns, but plays briskly and airily over all things within its reach, enriching and adorning them; insomuch that one could ask no greater pleasure than to be the continual theme of it.  In its irrepressible vivacity it waits not for occasion, but runs on for ever, and we wish it to run on for ever:  we have a sort of faith that her dreams are made up of cunning, quirkish, graceful fancies; her wits being in a frolic even when she is asleep.  And her heart seems a perennial spring of affectionate cheerfulness:  no trial can break, no sorrow chill, her flow of spirits; even her sighs are breathed forth in a wrappage of innocent mirth; an arch, roguish smile irradiates her saddest tears.  No sort of unhappiness can live in her company:  it is a joy even to stand her chiding; for, “faster than her tongue doth make offence, her eye doth heal it up.”

So much for her choice idiom of wit.  But I must not pass from this part of the theme without noting also how aptly she illustrates the Poet’s peculiar use of humour.  For I suppose the difference of wit and humour is too well understood to need any special exposition.  But the two often go together; though there is a form of wit, much more common, that burns and dries the juices all out of the mind, and turns it into a kind of sharp, stinging wire.  Now Rosalind’s sweet establishment is thoroughly saturated with humour, and this too of the freshest and wholesomest quality.  And the effect of her humour is, as it were, to lubricate all her faculties, and make her thoughts run brisk and glib even when grief has possession of her heart.  Through this interfusive power, her organs of play are held in perfect concert with her springs of serious thought.  Hence she is outwardly merry and inwardly sad at the same time.  We may justly say that she laughs out her sadness, or plays out her seriousness:  the sorrow that is swelling her breast puts her wits and spirits into a frolic; and in the mirth that overflows through her tongue we have a relish of the grief with which her heart is charged.  And our sympathy with her inward state is the more divinely moved, forasmuch as she thus, with indescribable delicacy, touches it through a masquerade of playfulness.  Yet, beneath all her frolicsomeness, we feel that there is a firm basis of thought and womanly dignity; so that she never laughs away our respect.