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Updated: June 28, 2025
When a poet is in warm sympathy with the divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in his similitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition. In citing some of the most prominent in the "Divina Commedia," we at once give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latest translators, using the version of Dr.
I now read more attentively the earlier portions of his letter. They described, in glowing colours, the wondrous country in which he had fixed his home; the joyous elasticity of its atmosphere; the freshness of its primitive, pastoral life; the strangeness of its scenery, with a Flora and a Fauna which have no similitudes in the ransacked quarters of the Old World.
The likeness between the language of Jesus and that found in the Similitudes may therefore prove no more than that the Daniel vision was more or less commonly interpreted of a personal Messiah in Jesus' day. Much of the use of the title by Jesus, however, is completely foreign to the ideas suggested by Enoch and Daniel.
Where these predominate, "things that remain are ready to die." And there is no other remedy but that of applying to the "Seven Spirits of God," which Christ is ready to shed abundantly on all who make believing application. Christ threatens to "come as a thief" upon those who do not "watch." In similitudes, we are not to indulge a licentious fancy in our attempts to interpret them.
Empedocles, that a woman's imagination in conception impresses a shape upon the infant; for women have been enamoured with images and statues, and the children which were born of them gave their similitudes. The Stoics, that the resemblances flow from the sympathy and consent of minds, through the insertion of effluvias and rays, not of images or pictures.
And so as in a table be it witty words, of which TACITUS is full; sentences, of which LIVY; or similitudes, whereof PLUTARCH: straight to lay it up in the right place of his storehouse as either military, or more specially defensive military, or more particularly, defensive by fortification and so lay it up. So likewise in politic matters.
Having decided this negatively, he resolved to go to sleep immediately: not being able to accomplish this to his satisfaction, he tossed and tumbled, like Achilles or Orlando, first on one side, then on the other; repeated to himself several hundred lines of poetry; counted a thousand; began again, and counted another thousand: in vain: the beautiful Cephalis was the predominant image in all his soliloquies, in all his repetitions: even in the numerical process from which he sought relief, he did but associate the idea of number with that of his dear tormentor, till she appeared to his mind's eye in a thousand similitudes, distinct, not different.
I assured him, “how extremely desirous I was that he should be satisfied on every point; but I doubted much, whether it would be possible for me to explain myself on several subjects, whereof his honour could have no conception; because I saw nothing in his country to which I could resemble them; that, however, I would do my best, and strive to express myself by similitudes, humbly desiring his assistance when I wanted proper words;” which he was pleased to promise me.
The Earth is but shivered into impalpable smoke by that Doom's thunder-peal; the Sun misses one of his Planets in Space, and thenceforth there are no eclipses of the Moon. Or better still, I might liken" Oh, enough, enough of likenings and similitudes; in excess of which, truly, it is hard to say whether Teufelsdrockh or ourselves sin the more.
And, therefore, Aristotle, when he says to Democritus, "if we shall indeed dispute and not follow after similitudes," as if he would tax Democritus with being too full of comparisons, where he thought to reprove, really commended him. There is no use in disputing in such a case, he thinks.
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