Contents
-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
T. Buchanan Read
His full heart ached with love’s sweet pain
Like a sealed fountain, charged with rain,
That longs to sing in the summer air,
Yet faints in the caverns of despair.Away, like mists when winds arise.Beats like a maniac drummer in mid-battle.As black as the steeds of night.Black as fiery Africa’s slaves.Blind as the song of birds.Bold as an embodied storm.Bright as a cloud in the sunset air.Burn like the red light of the setting sun.Calm like the sleep of a soul that is blest.Ceaselessly,
Like delicate hands that are clapped in glee.Clung … like magnet to steel.Her temper is as crabbed as a thorn.Dazzle like a new-discovered star.Droop, like unfolded wings half spread for flight.Exhaustless as the choral founts of night.Faithful as the star is to the night.Flit like a swallow that stoops to lave its burnished bosom in the wave.Gleam, like a glow-worm in the night.Gleams like a rising harvest moon.Glows like a golden group of buttercups.Glowed, like great archangels moving slow
On some celestial road.Grasp like a scourge.Hung like mists o’er sleeping streams
In uninhabitable lands.Like a leaf on a withering limb,
The fluttering life still clung to him.Mad as the delirious dream
Of one who, on an Indian stream
Floating in a Morphean bark,
Feeds on the charmèd lotus leaf.Moan, like me who hath lost the last and best.Murmurs, like the sea’s, dying uncomprehended.Noiseless as sleep.Noiseless as the years descend.Noiseless as the owlet’s wing.Grew pallid and shrank,
As a taper in sunlight sinks faint and aghast.Pure and chaste as the falling snow.Red as Mont Blanc at morning glows.Red … as the forge’s mouth.Roar
Like ocean battling with the shore.A silken rustle,
Like the meeting of guests at a festival.Secure, as evening shuts behind the day.Shattered, as though they had stood a siege at Rome.Shrank,
As a taper in sunlight sinks faint and aghast.Sighing as April sighs for May.As a swallow chases the summer, we sped.Still as the hour of death.Strong … as young Desire.Struggle, like a stricken hare
When swoops the monarch bird of air.Surely as Winter taketh all.Sweep like bitter Nor’land gales.Music sweeter than the sweetest chime of magic bells by fairies set a-swinging.Swift as a cloud gust-driven from the sun.Swift as a shadow o’er the meadow grass chased by the sunshine.Swift as signal fires.A Spectre, thin as that dismal flame
That burns and beams, a moving lamp,
Where the dreary fogs of night encamp.Paths now lie together, as our footprints on the strand.Tossed like a fretted shallop-sail
Between ocean and the gale.Uncared for, like a useless wayside stone.Vanished, like the writing from the sand.Veiled like a nun.Voice, low as the summer music of a brook.Voiceless as a funeral train.Was waked as by a bugle call.Worried,
Like a tempest-driven bark.
