"Bright flag at yonder tapering mast,
Fling out your field of azure blue."

In Longfellow's "Midnight Mass for the Dying Year," there is a fine succession of personifications:

"Yes, the year is growing old,

And his eye is pale and bleared!
Death with frosty hand and cold,

Plucks the old man by the beard,
Sorely, sorely!"

This figure is of constant occurrence in Holy Writ, and is especially to be found couched in prophetic language:

"Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth !" "Awake, awake! put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city; for henceforth there shall no more come unto thee the uncircumcised and the unclean."

Such, too, is the nature of our Saviour's address to Jerusalem, when he wept over the city; but here, in addition to the Personification, we have also the use of Metonymy by which Jerusalem, thus personified, stands for the people who live in Jerusalem.

(104.) Apostrophe.

Apostrophe (Greek, ano and orpɛpw, to turn from) signifies a turning away from the general current of the discourse, to make a direct address to some per

son or object; this is of a digressive character, and is usually imaginative in its aim; thus, we may speak to a person absent or dead, as though present; or it may be an appeal made by the counsel to a judge in the midst of his speech to the jury. Thus, too, God is constantly apostrophized in prayer.

But it is not necessary that what we apostrophize should be a living or an animate being; the apostrophe is also used in conjunction with the figure of personification, in an address to that which is inanimate and impersonal. Such is Milton's "Address to Light:"

"Hail! Holy light! offspring of Heaven first born,
And of the eternal, coeternal beam."

Indeed these figures, joined in the form of an address to those things destitute of life, are of frequent recurrence in Milton, and form one great charm of his poetry. Thus, in "Lycidas" he begins:—

"Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

I come to pluck your berries harsh and rude."

And again :

"O fountain Arethuse, and thou honoured flood,
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds!"

Ideal personages are often thus addressed :

-

"Hence, loathed melancholy,

Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born!"

Or again, in "L'Allegro :"

"Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful jollity,

Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles."

Collins, in his beautiful "Ode to Evening," uses the Apostrophe with fine effect:

"O Nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun
Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts,

With brede ethereal wove,

O'erhang his wavy bed,

Now teach me, maid composed,

To breathe some softened strain."

The Apostrophe is one of the most natural of figures, and is especially the language of an excited fancy. It imparts an exaltation to style which gives additional energy. What is finer, in effect, than Byron's "Apostrophe to Ocean ?"

"Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form

Glasses itself in tempests! In all time

Calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm,

Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark heaving; boundless, endless, and sublime!"

(105.) The Allegory.

This word, derived from the Greek anos, another, and ayopeve, to speak, means, literally, saying one thing and meaning another. As a figure it implies telling a story, the events and personages of which are fictitious, but which in their combination illustrate what is true and important. It is evidently a kind of continued metaphor. The Bible is full of the use of the Allegory: of this nature were our Saviour's parables, in which, under the guise of "the field," "the good seed," "a flock," "a grain of mustard seed," &c., he spoke of the Jews, and his own disciples, the Gentiles, and the spread of his kingdom. The Song of Solomon is a series of highwrought allegories. In the eightieth Psalm may be found one of the finest and most beautifully illustrative; in which the children of Israel are compared to a vine, and the metaphor is kept up in explanation of God's gracious dealings with them. The allegory has been used by great writers as the means of inculcating truth. Very frequently it is found as a pleasant episode in a long discourse, lending interest and energy to the style, as in Milton's "Areopagitica:"—

Truth, indeed, came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape, most glorious to look on; but when he ascended, and his apos

tles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes, of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and

scattered them to the four winds."

But sometimes the entire discourse is an Allegory. Such is the case in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress,' a book universally known, admired, and understood. So also Spenser's "Faërie Queene" is, in its plan, an organized allegory, carried out in many diversified allegories. Dante's "Divina Commedia," if not what we would call a continued allegory, is full of smaller allegorical events and descriptions. Thus Beatrice represents, when taken literally, the soul of Dante's earthly love; but, in the figurative sense, Theology is personified, and by her assistance the poet is made to comprehend the mysteries of religion. The allegorical character of the poem Dante has made known to us, in a letter to a friend, in these words :"The first sense is that which it derives from its language, and another is that which it derives from the things signified by the language; the one literal; the other, allegorical."

Of the nature of allegory are also those exquisite poems, "The Ancient Mariner," by Coleridge, and "St. Agnes' Eve," by Keats. Those who would read them only for the apparent story, as literally told,