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To speak simply, and without any metaphor, Mr Jones slept till eleven the next morning, and would, perhaps, have continued in the same quiet situation much longer, had not a violent uproar awakened him.
Shakespeare's temptation is to push a willing metaphor beyond its strength, to make a passion over-inform its tenement of words; Milton can not resist running a simile on into a fugue. One always fancies Shakespeare in his best verses, and Milton at the keyboard of his organ. Shakespeare's language is no longer the mere vehicle of thought; it has become part of it, its very flesh and blood.
Nor need I do more than point out how the context of the words that I have ventured to detach from their surroundings is instructive: 'Let all those that put their trust in Thee rejoice because Thou defendest them. The word for defending there continues the metaphor that lies in the word for 'trust, for it means literally to cover over and so to protect.
I need not remind you how frequently that same metaphor occurs in Scripture; how in the early Jewish ritual the great seven-branched lampstand which stood at first in the Tabernacle was the emblem of Israel's office in the whole world, as it rayed out its light through the curtains of the Tabernacle into the darkness of the desert.
Friendship lay ostensibly in the Middle West, but it actually stood if one may be pardoned an appropriate metaphor upon the confectionery shelf of the fiction shop, preserved in a thick syrup and set up where a tender light could strike across it at all hours.
Now it is not fanciful, nor riding a metaphor to death, when I dwell upon these features of the emblem in order to suggest their analogies in Christian life.
As Paul puts it, with a metaphor drawn from Gentile instead of from Jewish life, as in our text, 'Our citizenship is in heaven. Philippi, to the Christian Church of which that was said, was a Roman colony; and the characteristics of a Roman colony were that the inhabitants were enrolled as members of the Roman tribes, and had their names on the register of Rome, and were governed by its laws.
In Hollis's "Salutatory" to the people of Dry Bottom he had announced in a quiet, unostentatious paragraph that while he had not come to Dry Bottom for a free fight, he would permit no one to tread on his toes. His readers' comprehension of the metaphor was complete as was evidenced by the warm hand-clasps which he received from citizens who were not in sympathy with the Dunlavey regime.
And of course I shouldn't care to have that dog find out that this apparently Peavey world flawlessly Peavey has a streak of Lansdale running through it that it has even its moments of curious, hard suspicion, of distrust, of downright disbelief in all the good things, in short, its Miss Katherine Lansdale moments, if you will pardon that hastily contrived metaphor."
We speak of being "goaded" to do a thing when some one persuades or threatens or irritates us into doing it. But a goad was originally a spiked stick used to drive cattle forward. The word goad, then, as we use it now, is a real metaphor. Again, we speak of our feelings being "harrowed." From this meaning it has come to have the figurative meaning of wounding or ruffling the feelings.
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