of his comparisons is wondrous: like follows like in no homœopatihic dose. For instance, take some lines in a angle page (48):
Our blood, our hearts, our souls,
Shall henceforth mingle in one being, like
The married colours in the bow of heaven.
My soul is like a wide and empty fane …
My soul is empty, lorn, and hungry space;
Leap thou into it like a new-born star,
And 'twill o'erflow with splendour and with bliss …
Thus, like a worshipper before a shrine,
He earnest syllabled, &c.
Or again, in another single page (61):
Night the solemn, night the starry,
Oh, that death would let me tarry
Like a dewdrop on a flower,
Ever on those lips of Clari!
Our beings mellow, then they fall,
Like o'er-ripe peaches from the wall …
—Moon! that walkest the blue deep,
Like naked maiden in her sleep, &c.
The splendid-mooned and jewelled night is said to uprise
With showery tresses like a child from sleep.
The moon,
like a swimmer who has found his ground,
Comes rippling up a silver strand of cloud.
In almost a erase for similitudes—for he would have nothing in his book but "doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange"—Mr. Smith occasionally lights on one somewhat "saucy and overbold." A lover, rhapsodising about his queenly maiden fair, tells how
Round her heart, a rosebud free,
Reeled he, like a drunken bee,
and was very properly refused admittance, being so indecently overcome (with honey of course). A gentleman in the dumps is seen with a misery perched
I' the melancholy comers of his mouth,
Like griffins on each side my father's gate.
There are "spirits that walk time, like the travelling sun, with sunset glories girt around his loins." What are we to say of such expressions as "the unlashed eye of God"—love "sitting like an angel on the heart"—verse "but relieves me as a six-inch pipe relieves the dropsied sea?" Not unfrequently we meet with an arrangement of words hovering curiously on the absurd: thus, in a tender love-scene, the braw wooer, describing the insidious process of an incipient embrace, says,
Gradual crept my arm around her, 'gainst my shoulder came her head,
possibly with a collision that ensured head-ache for the rest of the day. He informs us, too, in his lofty fashion, that
Were she plain Night, he'd pack her with his stars.
