id and serene
The hemisphere of air, when Boreas
Is blowing from that cheek where he is mildest,
Because is purified and resolved the rack
That erst disturbed it, till the welkin laughs
With all the beauties of its pageantry;
Thus did I likewise, after that my lady
Had me provided with a clear response,
And like a star in Heaven the truth was seen."
_Paradiso_: Canto XXVIII.

The first question to ask in regard to a simile found in verse is, Is
it poetical? Is there, as effect of its introduction, any heightening
of the reader's mood, any cleansing of his vision, any clarification
of the medium through which he is looking? Is there a sudden play of
light that warms, and, through this warmth, illuminates the
object before him? Few of those just quoted, put to such test, could
be called more than conventionally poetical--if this be not a
solecism. To illustrate one sensuous object by another does not
animate the mind enough to fulfill any one of the above conditions.
Such similitudes issuing from intellectual liveliness, there is
through them no steeping of intellectual perception in emotion. They
may help to make the object ocularly more apparent, but they do not
make the feeling a party to the movement. When this is done,--as in
the examples from Canto XV. of the "Inferno," and Canto VIII. of the
"Purgatorio,"--what an instantaneous vivification of the picture!

But in the best of them the poetic gleam is not so unlooked-for bright
as in the best of Shakespeare's. As one instance out of many: towards
the end of the great soliloquy of Henry V., after enumerating the
emblems and accompaniments of royalty, the king continues,--

"No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave;
Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind,
Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell;
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set,
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn,
Doth rise _and help Hyperion to his horse_"

What a sudden filling of the earth with light through that image, so
fresh and unexpected, of the rising sun, with its suggestion of beauty
and healthfulness! Then the far-reaching, transfiguring imagination,
that, in a twinkle, transmutes into the squire of Hyperion a stolid
rustic, making