mind, that what would be a Metaphor in a more logical and cultivated age, with him riots in Simile which overflows its banks. His similes not merely go beyond[1] the mark of likeness; in extreme cases they even turn into contrariety. If he were not so carried away by his illustration, as to forget what he is illustrating (which belongs to a quaint mind), he would never paint for us such full and splendid pictures. Where a logical later poet would have said that Menelaus
With eagle-eye survey'd the field,
the mere metaphor contenting him; Homer says:
Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle,
Which, of all heaven's fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest:
Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth,
Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush: but straight at it he souseth,
Unerring; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.
I feel this long simile to be a disturbance of the logical balance, such as belongs to the lively eye of the savage, whose observation is intense, his concentration of reasoning
- ↑ In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. 138 above, only the two first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr Gladstone, seduced by rhyme, has so tapered off the point of the similitude, that only a microscopic reader will see it.
