What miracle thus dazzles with surprise; Distinct in rows the radiant columns rise! The walls, wherein my wondering sight I turn, And roofs amidst a blaze of glory burn. Some visitant of pure ethereal race With his bright presence, deigns the dome of grace^[17-2]. Not less prolific in metaphors of the same description is Virgil. But particularly interesting is one of his metaphors that occurs in the eighth book of the _Aeneid_ (409–13), inasmuch as it seems to be a poetical imitation of another found in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs, in which the model housewife—the _Esheth Chayil_—is so beautifully described, who rises early in the morning, wakes her housemaids, and prolongs the day with the help of a lamp. It runs thus:— Now, when the night her middle race has rode, And his first slumbers had refreshed the god, The time when early housewives leave the bed; When living embers on the hearth they spread, Supply the lamps, and call the maids to rise; With yawning mouth, and with half-opened eyes They ply the distaff by the winking light, And to their labour add the night^[18-1]. We pass now to another fruitful subject, from which the writers of the Bible have often taken metaphors, viz. the sea, the torrent, and the waters, generally that mostly serve to typify calamity. So Job (vi. 15) has a long and quite Homeric metaphor, formed from a torrent, which begins with the words: “My brothers have dealt deceitfully as the torrent, nay, as a channel of torrents that pass away.” Sometimes roaring waters are used in the Bible as symbols of a battle cry, or of the tumult of an invading army. Thus we find in the eighth chapter of Isaiah the following description of the invasion of Palestine by the king of Assyria: “Behold, the Lord bringeth up upon thee the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king of Assyria: and he shall come up over all his channels, and go over all his banks . . . he shall overflow and go over and shall reach even to the neck.” A similar metaphor is contained in the seventeenth book of the _Iliad_ (263), which runs thus:— Like a mountain billow that foams and raves, Where some swoll'n river disembogues his waves; Full in the mouth is stopp'd the rushing tide, The boiling ocean works from side to side, The river trembles to his utmost store, And distant rocks re-bellow to the roar: So fierce to the charge great Hector led the strong, Whole Troy embodied rush'd with shouts along. Metaphors of a similar kind are also now and again employed by Virgil, and once he uses both fire and the torrent at the same time as similes of uproar and destruction, which usually take place on the battlefield. The simile in question, which occurs in the _Aeneid_ (xii. 760), reads thus:—