5 In the treatment, again, of familiar topics and in descriptive passages nothing gives such distinctness as a close and continuous series of metaphors. It is by this means that Xenophon has so finely delineated the anatomy of the human frame.[5] And there is a still more brilliant and life-like picture in Plato.[6] The human head he calls a _citadel_; the neck is an _isthmus_ set to divide it from the chest; to support it beneath are the vertebrae, turning like _hinges_; pleasure he describes as a _bait_ to tempt men to ill; the tongue is the _arbiter of tastes_. The heart is at once the _knot_ of the veins and the _source_ of the rapidly circulating blood, and is stationed in the _guard-room_ of the body. The ramifying blood-vessels he calls _alleys_. “And casting about,” he says, “for something to sustain the violent palpitation of the heart when it is alarmed by the approach of danger or agitated by passion, since at such times it is overheated, they (the gods) implanted in us the lungs, which are so fashioned that being soft and bloodless, and having cavities within, they act like a buffer, and when the heart boils with inward passion by yielding to its throbbing save it from injury.” He compares the seat of the desires to the _women’s quarters_, the seat of the passions to the _men’s quarters_, in a house. The spleen, again, is the _napkin_ of the internal organs, by whose excretions it is saturated from time to time, and swells to a great size with inward impurity. “After this,” he continues, “they shrouded the whole with flesh, throwing it forward, like a cushion, as a barrier against injuries from without.” The blood he terms the _pasture_ of the flesh. “To assist the process of nutrition,” he goes on, “they divided the body into ducts, cutting trenches like those in a garden, so that, the body being a system of narrow conduits, the current of the veins might flow as from a perennial fountain-head. And when the end is at hand,” he says, “the soul is cast loose from her moorings like a ship, and free to wander whither she will.” [Footnote 5: _Memorab._ i. 4, 5.] [Footnote 6: _Timaeus_, 69, D; 74, A; 65, C; 72, G; 74, B, D; 80, E; 77, G; 78, E; 85, E.] 6 These, and a hundred similar fancies, follow one another in quick succession. But those which I have pointed out are sufficient to demonstrate how great is the natural power of figurative language, and how largely metaphors conduce to sublimity, and to illustrate the important part which they play in all impassioned and descriptive passages.