The circumstances of the second line aggravate and heighten the sense of tedium suggested by the twicetold tale.

With the multiplication of particulars, there is an increase of the difficulties of adjustment. Sometimes the effect is overdone; sometimes it misses the mark; at other times it confuses and distracts the mind.

'He stands immovable, like a dead tree, which neither north nor south wind shakes.' The 'dead tree' is a very suggestive picture of immovability, and the additional circumstance adds to the effect.

Milton's similes applied to the hell-hounds in his picture of Sin fail to produce loathing. While the lines

Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, call'd
In secret, riding through the air she comes,
Lur'd with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon
Eclipses at their charms—

are fine in composition, the circumstances do not well conspire to his supposed purpose. The secrecy of the call is suggestive: the riding through the air is a mere convention: 'lur'd by the smell of infant blood' is the one horrible circumstance, but it is not followed or supported by corresponding action: the dancing with Lapland witches seems an irrelevant diversion.

Compare the powerful simile in Macbeth

—pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast.

Here, the superadded circumstance is too grand for the subject of the simile: the pathetic and the sublime pull opposite ways.

The simile, composed into an elaborate picture, is frequent in Tennyson. Guinevere's supplications, broken by tears, are compared to a stream that

-spouting from a cliff,

Falls in mid-air; but, gathering at the base,
Re-makes itself, and flashes down the vale.

We have here picturesqueness, in the first instance, and a certain illustrative resemblance next.

The following is from Helps——

'Not more different the sea, when some midsummer morning it comes, with its crisp, delicate, little waves, fondling up to your feet, like your own dog--and the same sea

SIMILES OF SURPRISE.

173

when, storm-ridden, it thunders in against you with foam and fury like a wild beast, than is the smiling, prosperous, civilized man, restrained by a thousand invisible fetters, who has not known real hunger for years, from the same man when he has starved and fought and bled, been alternately frozen and burnt up, and when his life, in fact, has become one mad, blinding contest with all around him.'

The resemblance between the two situations figured goes a certain way, but is not entirely satisfactory; a stormy sea and a man rendered desperate by misery do not sufficiently harmonize.

(3) Agreeable surprise.

'Princes,' says

This is an exceedingly numerous class. Bacon, 'are like to heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times, and which have much veneration but no rest.' This being said in the days of Astrology, the resemblance holds well throughout. Yet it scarcely contributes anything to our knowledge of princes; it might be said to heighten our. sentiment towards them by a lofty comparison, but this is prevented by the consciousness of exaggeration. Still, it is agreeable, from the ingenuity and unexpectedness of the comparison; and this particular effect is not diminished, but rather increased, by the loftiness of the subject adduced. The Miltonic similes rarely affect either the understanding or the feelings simply. To appreciate their worth, we must examine them under the third form, which admits that agreeable play of the imagination more especially identified with Poetry, subject however to the poetic conditions of concreteness and harmony.

Satan, in his indignation at being menaced by Death— -like a comet burn'd,

That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge

In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war.

We can call this nothing but a grouping of grand and terrible imagery, its bearing on the state of Satan's mind being quite unthinkable. So with the comparison that follows, when the two mighty personations were on the eve of a hostile encounter, and frowned at each other—

-as when two black clouds,

With heaven's artillery fraught, come rattling on
Over the Caspian, --then stand front to front
Hovering a space, till winds the signal blow
To join their dark encounter in mid-air.

The splendid Shakespeare passage--the Seven Agesprofesses to be set in the similitude of the Stage, but there is little attempt to sustain the comparison; the most salient points of a dramatic performance, such as the interaction of characters and the showy display, not being made prominent. A grander use of the resemblance is found in Cowper's lines, though more of the nature of metaphor. While God performs upon the trembling stage

Of his own works his dreadful part alone.

Yet, a single actor does not make a play.

These Similes of fancy are abundant in Keats. For example-
As when, upon a trancèd summer night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust

Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;

So came these words and went.

The idea to be expressed is merely that a long deep silence was broken only by one utterance; but occasion is taken to present a distinct picture intended to be pleasing in itself. So, again, the defeated Titans are thus described

Scarce images of life, one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor,

When the chill rain begins at shut of eve,

In dull November, and their chancel vault,

The heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.

There is here no help to the understanding; and, while there is a harmony of feeling between the simile and the things compared, the main purpose is evidently the pleasure of the comparison and the interest of the picture.

To the same class must be referred Wordsworth's simile in reference to the skylark

Happy, happy liver,

With a soul as strong as a mountain river.

Take the following series of similes in "Tam o' Shanter'

But pleasures are like poppies spread,

You seize the flower, its bloom is shed!

Or like the snowfall in the river,

A moment white-then melts for ever;

Or like the borealis race,

That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form,
Evanishing amid the storm.

Clearly so many similes were not needed either to express or to enforce the idea that pleasure is transitory; yet they serve their purpose as poetry in affecting the fancy.

SIMILE.

PROMISCUOUS EXAMPLES.

175

The following occurs in a seventeenth century writer:-'Man is like a book; his birth is the Title-Page of the book; his baptism is the Epistle Dedicatory; his groans and crying are the Epistle to the Reader; his infancy and childhood are the Argument or Contents of the whole ensuing treatise; his life and actions are the subject or matter of the book; his sins and errors of his life are the Errata, or faults escaped in the printing; and his repentance is the Correction of them,' &c., &c. This may be taken as a typical example of similes that are utterly useless. It throws no light on the subject; it rouses no appropriate emotion; and, as the resemblances traced are forced and artificial, it does not afford the pleasure of agreeable surprise. We may compare it with the following from Dr. Channing:-'Every man is a volume, if you know how to read him'. Here the metaphor, being confined to one suitable aspect of the comparison, expresses the thought in question with brevity and force. Consider now this simile from Shelley

There was a woman, beautiful as morning,

Sitting beneath the rocks, upon the sand
Of the waste sea;

on the bare strand

Upon the sea-mark a small boat did wait,

Fair as herself, like Love by Hope left desolate.

Obviously this is a simile either of elevation or of agreeable surprise. On the former interpretation, the object is to raise our sense of the desolate state of the woman by comparing her to Love, when Hope has entirely forsaken it. But, as the comparison stands, it does not work up this impression. We have first a concrete picture of the woman-beautiful and desolate; and here we have added to it, for additional effect, an abstract conception, which, moreover, is not sufficiently expanded to be easily grasped. As a simile of agreeable surprise, it is liable to the same objection; the comparison, though fitting and fresh, is not readily felt.

The simile in the Agamemnon of Eschylus, to set forth the disastrous career of Helen of Troy, may be examined as an effective instance of the laws of the Simile in particular.*

In the Ion of Plato, there is a famous simile drawn from the magnet. When a magnet suspends a succession of rings, the attractive force diminishes at each remove. Plato uses this to illustrate the divine inspiration of the poet, who imparts what he has received to his auditors.

* Whoso nurseth the cub of a lion

Weaned from the dugs of its dam, where the draught
Of its mountain-milk was free,

Finds it gentle at first and tame.

It frisks with the children in innocent game,
And the old man smiles to see;

It is dandled about like a babe in the arm,
It licketh the hand that fears no harm,
And when hunger pinches its fretful maw,
It fawns with an eager glee.

But it grows with the years; and soon reveals
The fount of fierceness whence it came:
And, loathing the food of the tame,
It roams abroad, and feasts in the fold,
On feasts forbidden, and stains the floor.

By each successive communication of spiritual or intellectual stimulus, the original inspiration becomes weaker and weaker.

There is a well-sustained and effective parallelism for heightening the feelings in the following from Adam Smith:

'As, in the ancient heathen religion, that holy ground which had been consecrated to some god was not to be trod upon but upon solemn and necessary occasions, and the man who had even ignorantly violated it became piacular from that moment, and, until proper atonement should be made, incurred the vengeance of that powerful and invisible being to whom it had been set apart; so by the wisdom of Nature, the happiness of every innocent man is in the same manner rendered holy, consecrated, and hedged round against the approach of every other man; not to be wantonly trod upon, not even to be, in any respect, ignorantly and involuntarily violated, without requiring some expiation, some atonement in proportion to the greatness of such undesigned violation.'

ALLEGORY.

1. When a comparison is protracted and sustained through numerous details, it is named an Allegory.

Allegories on the great scale are exemplified by Spenser's Faery Queen, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver. In these a whole series of adventures is sustained with a double meaning.

Spenser's Faery Queen is allegorical throughout; the virtues and vices being personified, and made to act out their nature, in a series of supposed adventures. In the Pilgrim's Progress the spiritual life or progress of the Christian is represented at length by the story of a pilgrim in search of a distant country, which he reaches after many struggles and difficulties. Swift's Tale of a Tub is an Allegory, wherein the divisions of Christianity (Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinistic) are satirized under the adventures of three brothers. So, in the Travels of Gulliver, the vices of politicians are ridiculed by being exemplified in communities made up of imaginary beings (Lilliputians or dwarfs, Brobdignagians or giants, Houyhnhmns, Yahoos).

The short Allegory is frequent in literature. In the Spectator, we have the Vision of Mirza, No. 159; Luxury and Avarice, 55; Truth, Falsehood and Fiction, 460.

The Parable is mostly a short Allegory. Such are the Sower, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, the Ten Virgins, the Two Debtors, &c. But there are also Parables that do not come under this description, such as the good Samaritan,