figurative connotation and
suggests nothing other than the notion itself for which it is used,
then it should be numbered among proper rather than metaphorical
expressions and does not fall in that class of tropes whose too
frequent use is here censured.

_On a too metaphorical style. Certain epigrams rejected for this
reason._

Though poets are granted a greater indulgence in the use of tropes,
nevertheless they have their own mean, or, as Cicero says, their own
modesty, and there is ever an especial ornament to be derived from
simplicity. Consequently those writers stray pretty far from beauty
for whom, as it were, all nature plays the ham to the point that they
say nothing in an ordinary way, imagine nothing in the way in which it
is perceived outside of poems, but instead elevate, debase, alter, and
clothe everything in a theatrical mask. For this reason we have
excluded from this anthology a number of epigrams as too metaphorical:
for example, these two by Daniel Heinsius, a man otherwise eminent in
scholarship and letters:

Driver of light, courier of the bright pole,
Surveyor of the sky, and hour-divider,
Servant of time, circler perpetual,
Cleanser of earth, disperser of the clouds,
Ever your chariot, fiery four-in-hand,
You curb fast; you who bear on the bright day
Steal from the world once more your countenance
And of your glowing hair conceal the flame;
Tomorrow from the arms of Tethys you
Return once more: but night has sealed my sun.

By my _sun_ he means Douza. And again:

Sweet children of the night, brothers of fire,
Small cohorts, citizens of the fiery pole,
Who wandering through the cloudless fields of air
Lead the soft choruses with a light foot
When our tired bodies are stretched softly out
And gentle sleep invades our conquered sense,
Why now as then through the enamelled halls
From the recesses, still, and the clear windows
Of the gold arch bear off his hallowed face?
Farewell, at last; you shall not see your Douza.[7]

In these epigrams, apart from the metaphors heaped up _ad nauseam_,
and each of them harsh and absurd, a keen critic has noted another
fault: namely, that nothing is more distant from the spirit of a man
grieving and mourning for the death of a friend--and this is what
Heinsius intended to depict--than such a wantonness of epithets. And
so much for diction.

_Truth, the primary virtue