The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a
pun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should have
been,--to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,--it
should read:
Hard was the _hand_ that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled,
for otherwise there is no identity of meaning in the word "hard" as
applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper
logical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit which
belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris:
Her heart and morning broke together
In tears,
which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might
almost have laughed at it. Here again the logic is unintentionally
violated in the word _broke_, and the sentence becomes absurd, though
not funny. Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure of
the United States Bank, we should at once see the ludicrousness of it,
though here, again, there would be no true wit:
His heart and Biddle broke together
On 'change.
Now let me give an instance of true fancy from Butler, the author of
"Hudibras," certainly the greatest wit who ever wrote English, and whose
wit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almost
rank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with a
contemporary, and therefore transitory, subject.
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