Go, lovely rose,

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.- Waller.

As the nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs are transferred from their literal applications, this figure, like allegory, is of course based upon metaphor. Its force and beauty arise from its exhibiting lifeless things in human form, fancifully endowed with human feeling and purpose. To confer personal life upon an inanimate object is the surest means of awakening our love or hatred toward it, and the tendency to do it is natural to every period of life. The child vents his anger upon the stone against which he has stumbled; and an older person, who does not strike it, feels an impulse to blame it. The ancient Greek regarded all outward objects as instinct with life. Tree, stream, cloud, and star were believed to possess human sensibility and intelligence.

The figures thus far noticed may be regarded as the Figures of Diction; that is, they arise chiefly from the figurative application of words. The third degree of personification may, perhaps with greater propriety, be regarded as a Figure of Thought.

Figures of diction are sometimes called tropes.' The term metaphor is then limited to such figures as are based upon the one relation of resemblance; as, a raging tempest, meaning such a tempest as, in its effects, resembles a raging man. 'He is a lion' he is like a lion. The designation of the figure is of little consequence, however. The important point to be remembered is, that the figurative use may at one time be based upon the relation of resemblance; at another, upon that of cause and effect, the

1 There is no essential difference between the etymology of the trope and that of metaphor. Both indicate the turning of a word from its primary

whole and its parts, subject and attribute, genus and species, etc.

Simile. A simile is an explicit statement of resemblance between two essentially different objects. Thus, 'The soldiers stood like statues, unmoved by the cannon's roar.' Also,

In my spirit doth thy spirit shine,

As shines the sunbeam in a drop of dew.'

In every such statement two parts are to be carefully the object to be illustrated, and the illusThe illustrative part — usually introduced is regarded as the simile.

distinguished trative object. by like or as

must

The student must not commit the error of thinking that every clause introduced by as or like is a simile. The objects compared must belong to different classesbe dissimilar in their general nature. A comparison between two individuals of the same species (as between two persons) may afford an example, but cannot constitute a simile. Compare, 'She is as short and dark as her brother,' with 'She is as short and dark as a mid-winter day.' The fact of comparison must be the test, rather than the introductory like or as, which is not always expressed. Thus,

'We have often thought that the public mind resembles that of the sea when the tide is rising. Each successive wave rushes forward, breaks and rolls back; but the great flood is steadily coming on.'

The simile becomes a metaphor when the resemblance is taken for granted - when one object is applied to the other directly. We no longer say, 'He was like a fox in the council,' but, 'He was a fox in the council.' A metaphor based upon resemblance is thus an implicit simile.

Allusion.—A historical or literary reference, more or less distinct. A thing supposed by the speaker to be well known to his hearers may be advantageously alluded to,

without being fully described. In the following, for instance, there is an allusion to the story of Jacob and the angel as related in the thirty-second chapter of Genesis:

Misery becomes as prosaic and familiar to me as my own health, but nevertheless I do not let go my idea, and will wrestle with the unknown angel, even should I halt upon my thigh.—Goethe. The following is an exquisite illustration: When I was a beggarly boy,

And lived in a cellar damp,

I had not a friend nor a toy,
But I had Aladdin's lamp.
When I could not sleep for cold,

I had fire enough in my brain;

And builded with roofs of gold

My beautiful castles in Spain. -Lowell.

Innuendo. Here the meaning is implied or insinuated, instead of being directly asserted. The figure is generally an obscure allusion to objects or facts that tend to depreciate the person or sentiment described:

All England, all America, joined in his applause. Hope elevated and joy brightened his crest.' I stood near him, and his face,' to use the expression of the Scripture of the first martyr, ‘was as it had been the face of an angel.' I do not know how others feel, but if I had stood in that situation I never would have exchanged it for all that kings in their profusion could bestow.— Burke.

Apostrophe.'-An apostrophe is a digressive address:

You all did love him once not without cause;
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.-Shakespeare.

'That very night in which my son was born,

My nurse, the only confidant I had,

Set out with him to reach her sister's house.
But nurse and infant have I never seen,

1 From the Greek, meaning a turning from. The speaker turns suddenly from the current of thought, and, instead of speaking of an object, addresses it

Nor heard of Anna since that fatal hour.

My murdered child! had thy fond mother feared
The loss of thee, she had loud fame defied,
Despised her father's rage, her father's grief,

And wandered with thee through the scorning world.' From the first example, it appears that apostrophe may, as it frequently does, involve personification; from the second, that it may represent the absent and dead as present and living.

Vision.-Vision is a representation of the past, future, or absent, as present:

I seem to myself to behold this city, the ornament of the earth and the capital of all nations, suddenly involved in one conflagration. I see before me the slaughtered heaps of citizens, lying unburied in the midst of their ruined country.-Cicero.

Notice, also, Byron's description of a storm in the Alps:
The sky is changed! and such a change! O night
And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light
Of a dark eye in woman! Far along
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,
Leaps the live thunder, not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,

And Jura answers from her misty shroud

Back to the joyous Alps, which call to her aloud. The second example contains a variety of figures, and the pupil should be ever watchful for such intermixture in all examples. Thus, the first line, besides the vision and a figure yet to be defined (exclamation), begins an apostrophe. The second, third, and fourth lines contain not only apostrophe, but personification and simile. The sixth line contains vision and metaphor in one and the same word 'leaps.' Lines 6-7 contain, besides vision, the first and second degrees of personification in 'live,' 'tongue,' 'her,' and 'joyous'; and the third degree in 'call.'

1 From the Latin videre, to see.

Hyperbole.'-Hyperbole is the enlargement of an object beyond its natural and proper dimensions:

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.-Emerson.

So frowned the mighty combatants that Hell

Grew darker at their frown.- Milton.

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.-St. John. The object of this figure is to impress the mind strongly with the fact, by overstating the fact. Waves mountain-high' gives us a better idea of the effect of a storm at sea than the exact statement in feet and inches.

The language of the hyperbole may itself be literal (as in the examples given) or figurative. The true test is, not that the statement is literally untrue (which would be the case with all metaphors), but that the subject is magnified: as when a writer describes the carnage of a battle by rivers of blood and hills of slain,' where the italicized words are both metaphorical and hyperbolical.

Litotes.- Precisely the reverse of Hyperbole. A form by which, in seeming to lessen, we actually increase the force of an expression:

And he was not right fat, I undertake.—Chaucer.

To thee I call,

But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,

O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams.-Milton.

Antithesis. Antithesis is the union of opposites, to

render unlike things more striking by contrast:

The wicked flee when no man pursueth || but the righteous are bold as a lion.-Bible.

Though sullied and dishonored || still divine;
An heir of glory a frail child of dust;

1 From the Greek, meaning to throw beyond.

2 From the Greek, meaning to place against.