Saturday Night," in which Burns described family worship in a peasant's cot. Mrs. D. asked the old woman what she thought of the piece. She replied with indifference:

"The like of you Quality may see a vast in't; but I was aye used to the very same as a' that in my ain faither's house, and I dinna ken how he could hae described it ony ither way."

She was full of the notion that fine poetry must be opposite or superior to nature. Burns, when told of the old woman's criticism, said that he never had received a higher compliment.

The conception, very common, that there must be, in figurative passages, something vague, conjectural, undetermined, is another base view. Figures are governed by fixed, thoroughly ascertained laws, they are the very opposite of new inventions; under careful study have they been for many ages. For example, we have been aided in our treatment of them by reading Quintilian's Ninth Book, written some sixteen hundred years ago; and the subject was a very old one in his time. The right mode of interpreting them can not but have been long since defined with precision. By every honest writer they are employed, not to make his meaning obscure, but with the set purpose of rendering it brilliantly distinct; very often they are absolutely indispensable to an accurate statement of the truth. Let us never again be so weak as to utter the idiotic cry over a Scripture passage, “Oh, this is figurative," and to cradle ourselves in the opinion that, if figurative, it must needs be vague and obscure.

XXXV. Simile is the rhetorical figure that comes first before us. Of this, it is an express law that the names of the things compared are employed in their literal sense. A simile is a comparison distinctly stated; marked by some such word as "like" or "as." When it is said, "The wicked are like the troubled sea," both of the terms, "wicked" and "sea," are taken in their usual

sense.

Turn to William Wordsworth, greatest meditative poet the world has ever seen; sometimes prosy, sermonizing, but rich in the noblest moral truths nobly expressed; sympathizing most deeply with Nature, reading in her mountains, rivers, and lonely tarns or lakes deep among the hills, glorious hints of God and duty; and in these clouds, every where lovely, islanding the sky with charm. Of a calm evening he says, as one might of Wordsworth's own muse-which it precisely suits:

"It is a beauteous evening, calm and still.
The holy time as quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration."

All honor to him, were it but for the homage he paid to man's true nobility, in his selecting as the hero of the "Excursion," his most labored work, not baron or knight, but a Scotch peddler, whose knighthood came direct from God.

Turn back in the years to Thomas Lodge, the dramatist, who died of the plague in 1623. Note the Bible spirit that dictates his thought; may it imbue you with the feeling that every thought which breathes a Bible spirit is sure to be noble, and to contain in it the elements of poesy:

"Aye, but the milder passions show the man;
For as the leaf doth beautify the tree,
And pleasant flowers bedeck the painted spring,
Even so in men of greatest reach and power

A mild and piteous thought augments renown."

Bible influence reigns, the strongest impulse on his mind, in the opinions of the next writer from whom we quote, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the profoundest thinkers, one of the most imaginative poets, one of the most philosophical critics in our literature; unhappy in his being so desultory in his mental exertions; who,

L

if he had proposed to take you from Boston to New York, would have gone round by Cuba, the Sandwich Islands, and California, and likely would not have got to New York after all:

"Human experience," said he, "like the stern lights of a ship at sea, too often illuminates only the path we have passed over."

Lord Bacon, father of our modern Philosophy of Experiment, condescends to give us this:

"Tall men, like tall houses, are usually ill furnished in the upper story."

Or let a simile convey to you a criticism, in part just, on the style of Gibbon, whose "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is a most splendid masterpiece. Said of him the eminent Greek scholar, Professor Porson:

"Gibbon's style is too uniform; he writes in the same flowery and pompous style on every subject. He is like Christie, the auctioneer who says as much in praise of a ribbon as of a Raphael."

Or hasten to Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down and Connor, the great pulpit poet of England, the Spenser of theology, whose similes at times are over-rich, carrying him away from his subject to themselves. He thus compares the good man's prayers, that have to struggle their way to heaven through many a cross-wind of temptation, to the sinking, soaring, and singing of a lark:

"So have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upward, singing as he rises; and he hopes to get to heaven, and to climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back by the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of its wings, till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and rose and sang,

as if it had learned music and motion from an angel as he passed sometime through the air about his ministries here below. So is the prayer of a good man."

A simile that is over-rich; but how sweet a poem.

Spurgeon has found, as will every man of power and fervor, that the bare Gospel, impetuously preached, is stronger to make a sensation than artistic ceremonial, or pretty adornments hung in gaudy festoons around the portals of bliss and woe. Take this from him:

"God puts our prayers like rose-leaves between the leaves of his book of remembrance, and when the volume is opened at last, there shall be a precious fragrance springing from them."

Every sin against fact is a sin against taste. Skelton, a satirical poet of Henry the Eighth's day, thus writes:

"Merry Margaret,

As midsummer flower;

Gentle as falcon,

Or hawk of the tower."

Our idea of falcon and hawk is such that we would rather be excused from wedding a lady of that ravenous class. This simile, we fear, was predictive of sharp nails after marriage. Yet, though a daring simile, natural enough was Sydney Smith's, when, speaking of Daniel Webster, he said

"He struck me as much like a steam-engine in trousers."

There are two modes of treating a simile: one by simply affirming one thing to be like another; and one by not merely affirming a resemblance, but pointing out the nature and details of that resemblance. Sir Walter Scott, the Shakespeare of the North, says:

"The tear down childhood's check that flows

Is like the dew-drop on the rose.”

If he had stopped there, we would have had a simile

treated in the first way; but how much more effective when he expands:

"When next the summer breeze comes by,

And shakes the bush, the flower is dry."

Oliver Goldsmith contributes to us next. Vain as a peacock, guileless as a child; liberality itself; giving away his last waistcoat or last penny to the distressed, yet overflowing with a certain wondrous sagacity which he seemed incapable of using in his own affairs; master of a style admirably elegant, simple, easy; who in poetry, novel, comedy, essay, has left us masterpieces. Open his fine poem the "Traveler;" this passage is justly celebrated-of the Swiss mountaineer he speaks:

"Dear is that shed to which his soul conforms,
And dear that hill which lifts him to the storms;
And as a child, when scaring sounds molest,
Clings close and closer to the mother's breast,
So the loud torrent and the whirlwind's roar,
But bind him to his native mountains more."

In Moore's "Life of George Gordon, Lord Byron," the biographer in his beautiful prose declares of the gifted but licentious nobleman:

"Like the chestnut-tree, that grows best in volcanic soils, he luxuriates most where the conflagration of passion has left its mark."

You will observe here how botanical knowledge supplies a happy illustration; and the same can not but be true of all kinds of science and knowledge. To be quick in seeing likenesses between many things, you need to know many things. An ignorant, unobservant man is very unlikely to originate good similes, which to be good need. to be true to nature and to fact. If you would write a style richly illustrated, heap up facts in your mind. Hence it is that some whose style was bare and dry in youth, when their knowledge was very limited, have