(ii) The use of figurative language is frequently all that is meant. People who naturally employ metaphor and simile, especially when it is of an unusual kind, are said to have imagination. This may or may not be accompanied by imagination in the other senses. It should not be overlooked that metaphor and simile—the two may be considered together—have a great variety of functions in speech. A metaphor may be illustrative or diagrammatical, providing a concrete instance of a relation which would otherwise have to be stated in abstract terms. This is the most common scientific or prose use of metaphor. It is rare in emotive language and in poetry; Shelley’s “Dome of many-coloured glass” is almost the only example which springs to mind. More usually the elucidation is a mere pretence; some attitude of the speaker to his subject or to his audience is using the metaphor as a means of expression. “The freedom of my writings has indeed provoked an implacable tribe” said Gibbon, “but as I was safe from the stings, I was soon accustomed to the buzzing of the hornets”. But metaphor has yet further uses. It is the supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto unconnected things are brought together in poetry for the sake of the effects upon attitude and impulse which spring from their collocation and from the combinations which the mind then establishes between them. There are few metaphors whose effect, if carefully examined, can be traced to the logical relations involved. Metaphor is a semi-surreptitious method by which a greater variety of elements can be wrought into the fabric of the experience. Not that there is any virtue in variety by itself, though the list of critics who seem to have thought so would be lengthy; a page of the dictionary can show more variety than any page of poetry. But what is needed for the wholeness of an experience is not always naturally present, and metaphor supplies an excuse by which what is needed may be smuggled in. This is an instance of a very strange phenomenon constantly appearing in the arts. What is most essential often seems to be done as it were inadvertently, to be a by-product, an accidental concomitant. Those who look only to the ostensible purposes for the explanation of the effects, who make prose analyses of poems, must inevitably find them a mystery. But why overt and evident intention should so often destroy the effect is certainly a difficult problem.