t asked what does this
language prove? The answer is, God and Immortality! Alas! they are worth
nothing on 'Change!

Yet let him who would study his own happiness and well-being, follow the
advice given in the Good Book:

'Look upon the rainbow, and bless Him that made it, _for it is very
beautiful_.

'It encompasseth the heavens about with the circle of its glory;
the hands of the Most High have displayed it.'

As creation is symbolic, and the province of the poet is humbly to
imitate the works of the Great Artist, we must expect to find him also
make use of symbolic language, imagery.

Metaphor (metaphero) is the application of a physical fact to the moral
order; the association of an external material fact to one internal and
intellectual. As this association is not reflective, but spontaneous,
and is found pervading the infancy of languages; as it is intuitively
and generally understood; it must take place in accordance with a mental
law which establishes natural relations of analogy between the moral
world and the physical. To become perceptible, thought must be imaged,
reflected upon a sensuous form; the definition by an image is generally
the most clear and complete. We may have clear enough ideas of some
invisible truth in our own minds, but if we would convey our conception
to another, we cannot give it to him by a pure idea, for then we would
still be in the internal world of intellect; we must go out from this
internal world, we must seek a sign in the physical world that he can
see and contemplate; we select some phenomenon which can be easily
observed, and in accordance with the law of analogy of which we have
just spoken, we associate our thought with it, and in this manner we can
clearly communicate the thought we have conceived.

Almost all the ideas we have of the moral world are expressed through
metaphors: thus we say the _movements_ or _emotions_ of the soul; the
_clearness_ or _coloring_ of a style; the _heat_ or _warmth_ of a
discourse; the _hardness_ or _softness_ of the heart, &c., &c. Language
_expresses_ the invisible thought of the soul; in accordance with the
etymology of the word (exprimere) it _presses_ them from the soul, from
the realm of internal thought, to transport them to the visible sphere.
But the etymology itself is nothing but a metaphor, for the immaterial
facts of the soul always remain in their own region inaccessible to the
senses, and the instincti