His beams shall help my song, and both so twine, Till e’en his beams sing and my music shine.
It is against catachresis rather than against metaphor that philosophers should have inveighed. “There is,” says Seneca, “a vast number of things without names, which we call, not by proper designations, but by borrowed and adapted ones. We apply the word ‘foot,’ both to our own foot and that of a couch, and of a sail, and of a page, though these things are naturally distinct. But this results from the poverty of language.” “It is a ridiculous sterility,” says Voltaire, “to have been ignorant how to express otherwise an _arm_ of the sea, an _arm_ of a balance, an _arm_ of a chair; it is a poverty of intellect which leads us to speak equally of the _head_ of a nail, and the _head_ of an army.” It is this very frequent use of homonyms which leads to such great uncertainty about the meaning of many Hebrew words. Catachresis ought to be sparingly applied, and it possesses none of the advantages which arise from metaphor.
When the Megarians wanted assistance from the Spartans, they threw down an empty meal-bag before the assembly, and declared that “it lacked meal.” The Laconic criticism “that the mention of the sack was superfluous,” cannot be considered a fair one, because the action gave far more point to the request. When the Scythian ambassadors wished to prove to Darius the hopelessness of invading their country, instead of making a long harangue, they argued with infinitely more force by merely bringing him a bird, a mouse, a frog, and two arrows, to imply, that unless he could soar like a bird, burrow like a mouse, and hide in the marshes like a frog, he would never be able to escape their shafts. The tall poppyheads that Tarquinius lopped off with his stick in the presence of the messenger of Sextus, conveyed more vividly the intended lesson than any amount of diabolical advice; and turning[165] to Jewish history, we shall find that the prophets found it necessary to illustrate even _their_ language (metaphorical as it was) by living pictures--the rending of a garment, the hiding of a girdle, the pushing with iron horns--in order to bring home a vivid sense of conviction to the gross hearts of the people whom they taught.