Some of these are metaphors that were excellent in their first use and
original context; but they lose their excellence if repeated in any
context where they have not been discovered by the emotion of the
writer but are used by him to make a commonplace appear passionate.
Then they seem an unfortunate legacy from poetry to prose; and it is a
fact, I think, that our prose now suffers from the richness of our
past poetry. Even the prose writers of the Romantic movement regarded
prose as the poor relation of poetry; they did not see that prose has
its own reasons for existing, its own state of being and its own
beauties. They had the habit of writing about Shakespeare in
Shakespeare's own manner, which, in later plays such as _Antony and
Cleopatra_, is often a fading of one metaphor into another so fast
that the reader's or listener's mind cannot keep pace with it:

O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me,
That life, a very rebel to my will,
May hang no longer on me: throw my heart
Against the flint and hardness of my fault;
Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder.
And finish all foul thoughts.

The metaphors here, though instinctive rather than habitual, are
excessive even for the dying speech of Enobarbus. The style is the
worst model for prose, yet it has persisted as a mere habit in the
prose of writers who fear to be prosaic and who are prevented by that
habit from saying even what they have to say.

The principles of composition, whether verse or prose, are based on
the fact that the unit of language is not the word, or even the