ing an inanimate object. Thus, in the opening lines of Tennyson's Enone, "The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,” the poet imagines the vapour as a conscious. agent, and makes his description accordingly the more vivid and dramatic. A few lines further down, we come to a mixed simile and metaphor: 66 Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all Taking this passage word by word, "build" is a metaphor. The comparison with the walls of Troy is a simile, and the "cloud" is either a metaphor or a simile, according as we assume the phrase to signify (a) the walls rose like a cloud, or (b) the cloudy walls rose. So that for purposes of poetic style a strict differentiation between similes, metaphors, and personifications is of no great importance. The thing to note in this place is the splendid resource of variety, emphasis, and pictorial effect which is put at the disposal of a poet who is alert to the association of ideas. Shakespeare's ripe imagination was always brightening his style by the use of these aids. Take any one familiar scene from his plays, say the fifth of the First FIGURATIVE WRITING 45 Act of Hamlet, and you will find them too many to enumerate: Simile. 'Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their Thy knotted and combined locks to part, Simile. Like quills upon the fretful porcupine." Simile. “. . . That I, with wings as swift As meditation or the thoughts of love, Metaphor. May sweep to my revenge." Simile. "Duller should'st thou be than the fat weed Metaphor. The serpent that did sting thy father's life Simile. "Swift as quicksilver it courses through Metaphor. The natural gates and alleys of the body." Metaphor. "Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin." "Leave her to heaven, Metaphor. And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge Metaphor. "Yea, from the table of my memory. Within the book and volume of my brain.” Metaphor. "The time is out of joint." The reader will be able to add to these examples, and to discover sometimes even in single words an allusive or figurative meaning which the poet has seized upon to quicken the pleasure of his audience.* *See Note 3. PART II POETIC TRUTH § 17. Words Express Thoughts.-With this proposition we reach an entirely fresh point of view from which to approach language-study. Hitherto we have dealt with words as we might deal with schoolboys or soldiers, as the units in a community. We have seen them drawn up and drilled in the uniform rows of a dictionary, and between the lines of that book-a book which is no book, as Charles Lamb somewhat hastily called it-we have learnt to look for the history of words, and to distinguish one from another according to the elements of their character and nature. . Up and down their serried ranks we have traced the marks of difference. We have seen such a word as "amanuensis" standing shoulder by shoulder with "amaranth," just as the future head of the school might be ranged in alphabetical order with an incurable dunce, or as a future Sir Hector MacDonald might enlist simultaneously with a coward. Again, we have learnt to know something of the bearing of words in comradeship. As certain boys tend together, or as certain men fall into groups, so certain words in combination are more effective than apart. But throughout this stage of our inquiry, we have been treating words as creatures, as separate living organisms with powers and feelings of their own. We have now to change our point of view. We have now to look at the words, not as independent beings with a future and a past, but as the signs which a superior being uses to indicate his thoughts. If he is thinking of a wooden board erected on four wooden legs, he may express his thought by the following graphic sign,— But if he wishes to utter that sign aloud, or to reproduce it without a picture, he must have recourse to another set of signs. He must use a verbal sign instead of a graphic one. Accordingly he makes an agreement with those of like mind with himself-or, rather, they obey a common |