Nature has said it." More often, however, the function
of the figurative is to drive home a thought or a mood of which a mere
statement would leave us unmoved--to make us _feel_ it. Thus Burke
said of the Americans "Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and
attached on this specific point of taxing." He added: "Here they felt its
pulse, and as they found that beat they thought themselves sick or sound."
Had you been one of his Parliamentary hearers, would not that second
sentence have made more real and more important the colonial attitude to
taxation? The poets of course make frequent and noble use of the
figurative. This is how Coleridge tells us that the descent of a tropical
night is sudden:
"The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark."
The words _rush out_ and _at one stride comes_ convert the stars
and the darkness into vast beings or at least vast personal forces; the
comparisons are so natural as to seem inevitable; we are transported to
the very scene and feel the overwhelming abruptness of the nightfall. But
if a figure of speech seems artificial, if it is strained or far-fetched
or merely decorative, it subtracts from the effectiveness of the passage.
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