CHAPTER VIL 
ANALOGIES AND SIMILITUDES: 
BIRDS AND POETS ILLUSTRATING EACH OTHER. 
"We will entangle buds, and flowers, and beams, 
Which twinkle on the fountain's brim, and make 
Strange combinations out of common things." 
Prometheus Unbound. 
"Oft on the dappled turf, at ease 
I sit, and play with similies — 
Loose types of Things through all degrees." 
Wordsworth— To a Daisy. 
We love our own face in a mirror, and, like a second Nar- 
cissus, we grow amorous over it, shadowed in tlie burnished 
lapsing of a fountain — we love the stars sleeping in deep 
waters, too, (happy association !) and the pageantry of cloud, 
and rock, and tree, reversed in a still, liquid sky — ^in a word, 
we love all similitudes ! 
Perhaps this is because they illustrate to us a power of re- 
production external to ourselves, and this is such an ap- 
proach to that creative faculty which belongs to the " big 
imagination " in us, that, having no jealousy in our temper, 
we are charmed to see, even in " dumb nature," something 
like a rivalry of this " bright particular " — gift — we own. 
In truth, there is something worth following up in this 
idea. We should like to see the painter or the poet who 
could ever produce a landscape so cunningly, even to the 
last minute tracery of its lines and shades, as we have seen 
the unruffled surface of a lake do it some clear, calm morn- 
