he has recourse to simile and metaphor. Take, for example, the transience of human life, a subject on which at times we most of us have keen vague thoughts that, we imagine, would be so profound could our tongues but utter them. Blake's Thel is a symbol of the transience of life. O life of this our Spring! why fades the lotus of the water? Why fade these children of the Spring, born but to smile and fall? "Thel, the transient maiden, is.... What is Thel?" says Blake, in effect. Thel cannot be described straightforwardly. "What then is Thel _like_?" Ah! Thel is like a watery bow, and like a parting cloud, Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows on the water, Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant's face, Like the dove's voice, like transient day, like music in the air. [Sidenote: _DIALECT_] Shakespeare, in a corresponding difficulty, uses one convincing simile: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. Drummond of Hawthornden exclaims: This Life, which seems so fair, Is like a bubble blown up in the air By sporting children's breath.... Bacon speaks more boldly and concisely. He forsakes simile for metaphor, leaving the word _like_ to be understood. The World's a bubble, and the Life of Man Less than a span.... Were Tony to try and express himself by the same means, he would say: "The world's a bubble, like, and the life of man less than a span, like." _Like_, in fact, with the poor man as with the poet, connotes simile and metaphor. The poor man's vocabulary, like the poet's, is quite inadequate to express his thoughts. Both, in their several ways, are driven to the use of unhackneyed words and simile and metaphor; both use a language of great flexibility;[11] for which reason we find that after the poet himself, the poor man speaks most poetically. Witness the beautiful description: "All to once the nor'easter springed out from the land, an' afore us could down-haul the mainsail, the sea wer feather-white an' skatting in over the bows." New words are eagerly seized; hence the malapropisms and solecisms so frequently made fun of, without appreciation of their cause. _Obsolete_ has come hereto from the Navy, through sons who are bluejackets. Now, when Tony wishes to sum up in one word the two facts that he is older and also less vigorous than formerly, he says: "Tony's getting obsolete, like." A soulless word, borrowed from official papers, has acquired for us a poetic wealth of meaning in which the pathos of the old ship, of declining years, and of Tony's own ageing, are all present with one knows not what other suggestions besides. And when _obsolete_ is fully domesticated here, the _like_ will be struck off.