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Home  »  A Dictionary of Similes  »  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, and the longer it dwells upon, the deeper it sinks into the mind.

Base as spotted infamy.

Inseparably blend
Like two bright dewdrops meeting in a flower.

Blushing, like a bride.

Brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand.

Calm as the gliding moon.

As cheerful … as singing lark.

Chill me like dew damps of the unwholesome night.

Clamb’ring, like a runaway lunatic.

Clear as lake.

Clear as the morning.

Cold as clay.

Curling, like a wreath of smoke.

An orphan’s curse would drag to Hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is a curse in a dead man’s eye!

Burn dim, like lamps in noisome air.

Doleful as a cavern-well.

The ship went down like lead.

Down-trodden, as the untimely fruit
Shook from the fig-tree by a sudden storm.

Human experience, like the stern lights of a ship at sea, too often illuminates only the path we have passed over.

Fair as Eden’s bowers.

Fair, as the bosom of the swan.

Fair withal, as spirits are.

False and fair-foliaged as the manchineel.

It fanned his cheek
Like a meadow-gale of Spring.

Gladsome as the first-born of the spring.

Gleam
Like the bright rainbow on an evening stream.

Gripe like a convulsion.

Hueless as a ghost.

As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.

Ignorant as a bookseller.

Inaudible as dreams.

Light as the busy clouds.

Loud as a king’s defiance.

Some men are like musical glasses,—to produce their finest tone, you must keep them wet.

Mild,
As a mother with her child.

Pant as in a dream.

Placeless, as spirits.

Pure as the babe.

Voice was sweet indeed, but it was thin and querulous like that of a feeble slave in misery, who despairs altogether, yet cannot refrain himself from weeping and lamentation.

Ravenous as winter wolf.

Joy rises in me, like a summer’s morn.

Rouses me, as with a cherub’s trump.

As safe and sacred from the step of man
As an invisible world.

Shrinking back, like one that had mistook.

The sails did sigh like sedge.

Silence sank
Like music on my heart.

Singest like an angel in the clouds.

Sunk like lead into the sea.

Smile, as infants at a sudden light.

Smiling, like a sickly moralist.

As soft as honey-dew.

Steady,
Like eyes suffused with rapture.

Still as a slave before his lord.

Strong as an host of armed Deities.

Sweet as the whispered breeze of evening.

Swift as a spirit.

Swift as dreams.

Vaulted like rebounding hail.

Vibrating
Like some becalmed bark beneath the burst
Of Heaven’s immediate thunder.

A landscape rose
More wild and waste and desolate than where
The white bear, drifting on a field of ice,
Howls to her sundered cubs with piteous rage
And savage agony.