Richard II. act 5. sc. 3.
Northumberland. How doth my son and brother?
Thou tremblest, and the whiteness in thy cheek
Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand.
Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
So dull, so dead in look, so wo-be-gone,
Drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night,
And would have told him, half his Troy was burn’d;
But Priam found the fire, ere he his tongue:
And I my Percy’s death, ere thou report’st it.
Second Part Henry IV. act 1. sc. 3.
Why, then I do but dream on sov’reignty,
Like one that stands upon a promontory,
And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,
Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,
And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,
Saying, he’ll lave it dry to have his way:
So do I wish, the crown being so far off,
And so I chide the means that keep me from it,
And so (I say) I’ll cut the causes off,
Flatt’ring my mind with things impossible.
Third Part Henry VI. act 3. sc. 3.
—————— Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
Macbeth, act 5. sc. 5.
O thou Goddess,
Thou divine Nature! how thyself thou blazon’st
In these two princely boys! they are as gentle
As zephyrs blowing below the violet,
Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as rough,
(Their royal blood inchas’d) as the rud’st wind,
That by the top doth take the mountain-pine,
And make him stoop to th’ vale.
Cymbeline, act 4. sc. 4.
The sight obtained of the city of Jerusalem by the Christian army, compared to that of land discovered after a long voyage, Tasso’s Gierusalem, canto 3. st. 4. The fury of Rinaldo subsiding when not opposed, to that of wind or water when it has a free passage, canto 20. st. 58.
As words convey but a faint and obscure notion of great numbers, a poet, to give a high notion of the object he describes with regard to number, does well to compare it to what is familiar and commonly known. Thus Homer[3] compares the Grecian army in point of number to a swarm of bees. In another passage[4] he compares it to that profusion of leaves and flowers which appear in the spring, or of insects in a summer’s evening. And Milton,
—— As when the potent rod
Of Amram’s son in Egypt’s evil day
Wav’d round the coast, up call’d a pitchy cloud
Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind,
That o’er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung
Like night, and darken’d all the land of Nile:
So numberless were those bad angels seen,
Hovering on wing under the cope of hell,
’Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding fires.
Paradise Lost, book 1.
Such comparisons have, by some writers[5], been condemned for the lowness of the images introduced: but surely without reason; for, with regard to numbers, they put the principal subject in a strong light.
The foregoing comparisons operate by resemblance; others have the same effect by contrast: