tatters; " love is said to "burn;" suppressed wrath to "smoulder;" jealousy and envy "to gnaw the heart; " fear to "curdle" the blood. The lot of human life is represented as "a cup; " life itself is a "voyage," a journey," a "game,' a "lottery," a conflict,' or a 66 "war." 66 The apt use of metaphorical language is one great secret of power of expression. Its root lies in the imagination, which embodies the most abstract conceptions in pictorial images. To a writer gifted with acute perception, strong feeling, and an energetic imagination, thought seems involuntarily to clothe itself in concrete forms. He has not to seek and cast about for resemblances; they rather press and throng in upon him by the law of association, and as the natural accompaniment of the mind's unconscious energy. § 153. Our best writers, both in prose and verse, abound in metaphorical language. Without it they might yet be clear, persuasive, and instructive; but they would be shorn of their glory, and lose much of their unique power to sway the heart and control the very springs of feeling and action. § 154. A SIMILE is a comparison formally stated, as "Curses are like chickens: they come home to roost." Whose icy current and compulsive course E'en so my bloody thoughts with violent pace, § 155. In the metaphor, using the term in its more limited and exact sense, a comparison is implied only; in the simile it is explicitly stated, and often, especially in poetry, developed at length. In the following passage from Bacon we have metaphorical language, but no proper simile: : "Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." (Essay on Truth.) Here there is an implied comparison of the mind of man to one of the celestial bodies. It has its "motion," its "rest," and its "poles," on which it "turns." It would be possible to develop the comparison in the form of a simile; but the imperfectness of the analogy, which is no fault so long as it is only touched upon lightly, makes itself felt as soon as we endeavour to reduce the whole of the imagery to one consistent conception. § 156. Similes should be sparingly used in prose. The object of prose is usually either to instruct or to impress; and the formal simile tends too much to draw off the reader's attention to the parallel picture. This is no fault in poetry, where at least one capital end is to charm. Accordingly, in poetry, we sometimes find similes developed far beyond the actual requirements of illustration. This is constantly the case in Homer, as in the well-known beautiful example in the Eighth Book of the Iliad : "And these all night upon the bridge of war (Trans. by Tennyson.) In this magnificent simile the nightly camp and watchfires of Hector and his host are absolutely lost in the depths of "the immeasurable heavens." § 157. An equally striking example is presented in Milton's description of the applause which followed the speech of Mammon in Pandemonium : "He scarce had finished, when such murmur filled The sound of blustering winds, which all night long (Paradise Lost, ii.) From the burning lake to the "craggy bay" is a long journey; and each link of the chain of association is, in fact, carrying us farther and farther away. This would be strangely incongruous if the poet's object were simply "Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto." (Hor.) to tell us what the murmur of applause was like. But his purpose is poetic, not didactic. Pandemonium is one picture, and the "craggy bay" is another, scarcely less vivid, and all the more charming by contrast. Jeremy Taylor is fond of introducing fully developed similes into his discourses (see p. 146); and his frequent so have I seen drew down upon him the ridicule 66 of the more homely and practical South. § 158. Metaphor, on the other hand, may be used with the utmost freedom both in prose and verse. Its precise object is not charm, but force of expression. Metaphorical language is used not as an ornament, but as part of the very texture of the thought. It rests on the underlying analogies of things; and the deeper and more earnest the thought of the writer or speaker, the more certain is he to make ample use of its resources. Each word metaphorically used is simply a hammer for driving the nail home; as if the physical, no less than the mental world, must needs be pressed into service. $ 159. The following examples may serve to bring out this law of metaphorical language: "Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought he to weed it out." (Bacon, Essays.) "A man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well." (Ib.) "A good child is a stork to his parent, and feeds him in his old age." (Holy State.) "A poor man frame." (Ib.) is a picture of God's own making, but set in a plain "Scoff not at the natural defects of any which are not in their power to amend. Oh, 'tis a cruelty to beat a cripple with his own crutches! Neither flout any for his profession, though poor and painful [laborious]. Mock not a cobbler for his black thumbs." (Ib.) In all these instances the moral lesson gathers force and point from the implied appeal to physical analogy :-the "wild" plant which bears so close a resemblance to the fruitful species*; the raw, "green," and unhealed wound; the very birds of the air preaching the Fifth Commandment; and the noble picture in a plain frame: while * Compare Pope's development of this idea in the Essay on Man': "As fruits, ungrateful to the planter's care, On savage stocks inserted learn to bear," &c. (ii., p. 181.) imagination, humour, tenderness, all meet in the plea for the lowly and the deformed. § 160. The prose of Milton likewise glows through and through with imaginative and energetic metaphor. In the midst of the dreariest polemical discourses-in which he seems like another Samson grinding for Philistinesoccur here and there passages, the gorgeous imagery of which, no less than their stately march and rhythm, are unsurpassed. Among such may be mentioned that noble paragraph from the Animadversions for the Remonstrants' Defence against Smectymnuus (Mitford, iv. p. 220), where he speaks of the peril of a relapse from the reforming zeal of Wiclif: "O if we freeze at noon after their early thaw," &c., and that sublime, though fearfully vindictive strain which forms the conclusion of his Discourse of Reformation in England.' (Ib. iii. 68.) § 161. We select, as more suitable to our present purpose, a few examples from the 'Areopagitica"("a defence of unlicensed printing"), illustrating the legitimate use of metaphor, whether in enforcing common sense, intensifying scorn, or kindling enthusiasm : "Books are not absolutely dead things. they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.' "Books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil substance." 66 Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness." "A wise man, like a good refiner, can gather gold out of the drossiest volume." "Truth is compared in Scripture to a running fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition." "To him [his chosen divine] he adheres; resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys into his custody, and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion." ".. Make 'em and cut 'em out what religion ye please, there be recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream." ".. What a fine conformity would it starch us all into! Doubtless as staunch and solid a piece of framework as any January could freeze together," "I cannot praise a fugitive [Lat. fugitivus, a runaway slave], and cloistered [Lat. claustra, bolts and bars; hence, cloistered that shuts itself up] virtue, unexercised, and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." § 162. The student will not fail to note in these examples how complete is the alliance effected between the pairs of associated ideas. The two are felt to be brought together, not by some adroit cunning of the fancy, but in virtue of their both obeying an identical inner law. Books and meats-truth and tried gold-bodily discipline and the trial of virtue truth and clear running water— forced uniformity and congelation :-the one is the complement of the other; and when once brought together by the genius of the writer, they remain for ever inseparable. § 163. Another great master of figurative language is Burke. A few examples are subjoined, drawn from the magnificent disquisition, entitled, 'Reflections on the French Revolution : "It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws to be subdued by manners. "But now all is to be changed. . . All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to a dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion." "On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors. . . In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto [vista], you see nothing but the gallows." "I must bear with infirmities till they fester into crimes." “.. Rigidly screwing up right into wrong." 66 Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude." § 164. In passages like these expression seems to have reached its most perfect development; nor perhaps |