Roused the broad front and called the battle on.”
But these metaphorical rhapsodies were eclipsed soon after our Civil War by The Crescent Monthly in an article on Lee’s surrender. The writer thus laughs to scorn all competitors:
“The supreme hour has now come when, from across Fame’s burning ecliptic, where it had traced in flaming sheen its luminous path of glory, the proud Aldebaran of Southern hope, in all the splendors of its express, Hyades brightness, should sink to rest behind lurid war-clouds, in the fateful western heaven, there to bring out on death’s dark canopy the immortal lights of immortal deeds, and spirits great and glorious shining forever down upon a cause in darkness, like the glittering hosts upon a world in night.”
This gushing sentence comes from a novel called “Heart or Head:”
“And she, leaning on his strong mind, and giving up her whole soul to him, was so happy in this spoiling of herself, so glad to be thus robbed, offering him the rich milk of love in a full udder of trust, and lowing for him to come and take it!”
A grotesque simile is sometimes very expressive. We may mention those of Daniel Webster, who likened the word “would,” in Rufus Choate’s handwriting, to a small gridiron struck by lightning; of a sailor, who likened a gentleman whose face was covered with whiskers up to his very eyes, to a rat peeping out of a bunch of oakum; of a Western reporter who, in a weather item on a cold day, said that the sun’s rays in the effort to thaw the ice were as futile as the dull reflex of a painted yellow dog; and of a conductor who, in a discussion as to speed, said that the last time he ran his engine from Syracuse the telegraph poles on the side looked like a fine-tooth comb.
Similes of a like character are often heard among the common people, and are supposed to be the peculiar property of Western orators. Instances: As sharp as the little end of nothing; big as all out-doors; it strikes me like a thousand of bricks; slick as grease, or as greased lightning; melancholy as a Quaker meeting by moonlight; flat as a flounder; quick as a wink; not enough to make gruel for a sick grasshopper; not clothes enough to wad a gun; as limp and limber as an india-rubber stove-pipe; uneasy as a cat in a strange garret; not strong enough to haul a broiled codfish off a gridiron; after you like a rat-terrier after a chipmunk squirrel; useless as whistling psalms to a dead horse; no more than a grasshopper wants knee-buckles; no more than a frog wants an apron; don’t make the difference of the shake of a frog’s tail; soul bobbing up and down in the bosom like a crazy porpoise in a pond of red-hot grease; enthusiasm boils over like a bottle of ginger-pop; as impossible to penetrate his head as to bore through Mont Blanc with a boiled carrot; as impossible as to ladle the ocean dry with a clam-shell, or suck the Gulf of Mexico through a goose-quill; or to stuff butter in a wild-cat with a hot awl; or for a shad to swim up a shad-pole with a fresh mackerel under each arm; or for a cat to run up a stove-pipe with a teasel tied to his tail; or for a man to lift himself over a fence by the strap of his boots. A simile resembling these was used by Lady Montague when, getting impatient in a discussion with Fox, she told him she did not care three skips of a louse for him, to which he replied in a few minutes with the following:
“Lady Montague told me, and in her own house,
‘I do not care for you three skips of a louse.’
I forgive her, for women, however well-bred,