the barnacle-goose of the herbalist, was suspended over an
expectant world, ripening on a tree. But this we know, that
language in its mature state is fed and fattened on metaphor.
Figure is not a late device of the rhetorician, but the earliest
principle of change in language. The whole process of speech is a
long series of exhilarating discoveries, whereby words, freed from
the swaddling bands of their nativity, are found capable of new
relations and a wider metaphorical employ. Then, with the growth
of exact knowledge, the straggling associations that attended the
word on its travels are straitened and confined, its meaning is
settled, adjusted, and balanced, that it may bear its part in the
scrupulous deposition of truth. Many are the words that have run
this double course, liberated from their first homely offices and
transformed by poetry, reclaimed in a more abstract sense, and
appropriated to a new set of facts by science. Yet a third chance
awaits them when the poet, thirsty for novelty, passes by the old
simple founts of figure to draw metaphor from the latest technical
applications of specialised terms. Everywhere the intuition of
poetry, impatient of the sturdy philosophic cripple that lags so
far behind, is busy in advance to find likenesses not susceptible
of scientific demonstration, to leap to comparisons that satisfy
the heart while they leave the colder intellect only half
convinced. When an elegant dilettante like Samuel Rogers is
confronted with the principle of gravitation he gives voice to
science in verse:-


That very law which moulds a tear,
And bids it trickle from its source,
That law preserves the earth a sphere,