’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 instinctive facts of the organism always remain in the visible world, so that there can be no actual passage from one to the other, for an immaterial fact cannot be changed into a material one:—­association, simultaneousness, correlation may obtain between them, but nothing more.

Saint Thomas Aquinas asserts ’that in our present state of degradation the intellect comprehends nothing without an image.’  Language is in reality the association of material facts to facts of the will, heart, and intellect.  Apparently insufficient to give a full idea of material things alone, it would seem almost impossible that it should ever be able to express the facts of the invisible world; but the human spirit, in accordance with the mental law impressed upon it by the Hand Divine, seizes the analogies of