"The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, And the earth changes like a human face." "Earth is a wintry clod, But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes Over its breast to waken it." "The winds Are henceforth voices, in a wail or shout, A querulous mutter, or a quick, gay laugh,-- Never a senseless gust now man is born." The imagination thus proclaiming the banns between spirit and matter reminds us of Wordsworth's dear maiden, of whom he says,-- "She was known to every star in heaven, And every wind that blew." The impression of surprise which a perfect simile produces is transferred from the understanding back to the imagination before the former can venture to be amused. But sometimes the surprise lingers there long enough to have a narrow escape from smiling; as when Sir Thomas Brown, finding that midnight has overtaken him at his desk, says, "To keep our eyes open longer, were to _act_ the antipodes." His wakefulness is not only like the antipodal day, but dramatizes it; and this is a simile that imparts the shock of wit. Here is one from Shakspeare that approaches it, but is intercepted by a sense of beauty:-- "These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die; like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss, consume." And he says that, when the people saw Anne Boleyn at her coronation, such a noise arose "as the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest." Mr. Browning makes us smile when he paints the "poppy's red effrontery--till autumn spoils their fleering quite with rain," "And, turbanless, a coarse, brown, rattling crane Protrudes." This reminds me that in the West a bald man's head is spoken of as rising above the timber-line; which is quite in the style of American similes, as when Rufus Choate, who so frequently appeared to be saying to his jury, "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now," was described to be a man who always bored for water. Charles Lamb commenting upon the following line from Davenport's King John and Matilda,-- "And thou, Fitzwater, reflect upon thy _name_, And turn the _Son of Tears_,"-- says, "Fitzwater: son of water." A striking instance of the compatibility of the _serious pun_ with the expression of the profoundest sorrows. Grief as well as joy finds ease in thus playing with a word. Old John of Gaunt in Shakspeare thus descants on his name: "Gaunt, and gaunt, indeed;" to a long string of conceits which no one has ever yet felt to be ridiculous. The poet Wither, thus, in a mournful review of the declining estate of his family, says with deepest nature,-- "'The very name of Wither shows decay.'" But, in the following passage from John Fletcher's "Bonduca," pure poetry checks the laugh,-- "I have seen these Britons that you magnify Run as they would have outrun time, and roaring, Basely for mercy, roaring; the light shadows, That in a thought scur o'er the fields of corn, Halted on crutches to them."