is briefer and more striking than the simile; it
springs from greater emotion or mental energy, and often imparts great
force or beauty to a passage. Thus, likening human life to a voyage at
sea, Shakespeare says:

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries."

There are several errors that are not infrequent in the use of metaphor.
A metaphor should not be blended with plain language in the same
sentence, nor should it be extended too far. The latter fault is called
"straining the metaphor." Two incongruous metaphors should not be used
in the same sentence. In the following lines from Addison his muse is
first conceived of as a steed that needs to be restrained with a bridle,
and then as a ship that is eager to be launched:

"I bridle in my struggling Muse with pain,
That longs to launch into a bolder strain."

(3) _Personification_ is the attribution of life to inanimate things.
When we speak of "the _thirsty_ ground" or "the _angry_ ocean," we endow
these objects with the feelings of living creatures. Personification is
a bold species of metaphor; it is the offspring of vivid feeling or
conception, and often lifts discourse to a high plane. Thus, in "Romeo
and Juliet," we read,--

"Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops";

and in Shelley's "Queen Mab,"--

"How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
One, pale as yonder waning moon,
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn
When, throned on ocean's wave,
It blushes o'er the world:
Yet both so passing wonderful!"

(4) _Allegory_ is the description of one object in terms of another. It
is a sort of continued metaphor in which, however, the main subject of
discourse is not mentioned. In the following beautiful allegory, the
Jewish people are described in the character of a vine: "Thou hast
brought a vine out of Egypt; thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted
it. Thou preparedst room before it, and didst cause it to take deep
root, and it filled the land. The hills were covered with the shadow of
it, and the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars. She sent out her
boughs unto the sea, and her branches unto the river. Why hast thou then
broken down her hedges, so tha