By the help of an instance or two we can best realize to ourselves how great an advantage it thus obtains for itself. Suppose, for example, one were to content himself with saying, “He may wait till he is a beggar, who waits to be rich by other men’s deaths,” would this trite morality be likely to go half so far, or to be remembered half so long, as the vigorous comparison of this proverb: _He who waits for dead men’s shoes may go barefoot_?[12] Or again, what were “All men are mortal,” as compared with the proverb: _Every door may be shut but death’s door_? Or let one observe: “More perish by intemperance than are drowned in the sea,” is this anything better than a painful, yet at the same time a flat, truism? But let it be put in this shape: _More are drowned in the beaker than in the ocean_;[13] or again in this: _More are drowned in wine and in beer than in water_;[14] (and these both are German proverbs,) and the assertion assumes quite a different character. There is something that lays hold on us now. We are struck with the smallness of the cup as set against the vastness of the ocean, while yet so many more deaths are ascribed to that than to this; and further with the fact that literally none are, and none could be, drowned in the former, while multitudes perish in the latter. In the justifying of the paradox, in the extricating of the real truth from the apparent falsehood of the statement, in the answer to the appeal made here to the imagination,—an appeal and challenge which, unless it be responded to, the proverb must remain unintelligible to us,—in all this there is a process of mental activity, oftentimes so rapidly exercised as scarcely to be perceptible, yet not the less carried on with a pleasurable excitement.[15] [Sidenote: Rhyme in proverbs.]