“Desponding Father! mark this alter’d bough,
    So beautiful of late, with sunshine warm’d,
    Or moist with dews; what more unsightly now,
    Its blossoms shrivell’d, and its fruit, if form’d,
    Invisible? yet Spring her genial brow
    Knits not o’er that discolouring and decay
    As false to expectation.  Nor fret thou
    At like unlovely process in the May
    Of human life:  a Stripling’s graces blow,
    Fade, and are shed, that from their timely fall
    (Misdeem it not a cankerous change) may grow
    Rich mellow bearings, that for thanks shall call.”

It may be worth noting, that the first member of this no less beautiful than instructive passage contains one metaphor,—­“Spring her genial brow knits not”; and the second two,—­“in the May of human life,” and, “a Stripling’s graces blow, fade, and are shed.”  Herein it differs from the preceding instance; but I take it to be none the worse for that.

Shakespeare occasionally builds a simile on the same plan; as in the following from Measure for Measure, i. 3: 

                    “Now, as fond fathers,
    Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,
    Only to stick it in their children’s sight
    For terror, not to use, in time the rod
    Becomes more mock’d than fear’d; so our decrees,
    Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead;
    And liberty plucks justice by the nose;
    The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
    Goes all decorum.”

But the Poet does not much affect this formal mode of the thing:  he has comparatively few instances of it; while his pages abound in similes of the informal mode, like those quoted before.  And his peculiarity in the use of the figure consists partly in what seems not a little curious, namely, that he sometimes begins with building a simile, and then runs it into a metaphor before he gets through; so that we have what may be termed a mixture of the two; that is, he sets out as if to form the two parts distinct, and ends by identifying them.  Here is an instance from the Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, iv. 1: 

    “His foes are so enrooted with his friends,
    That, plucking to unfix an enemy,
    He doth unfasten so and shake a friend. 
    So that this land, like an offensive wife
    That hath enrag’d him on to offer strokes,
    As he is striking, holds his infant up,
    And hangs resolv’d correction in the arm
    That was uprear’d to execution.”

And so in King Henry the Fifth, ii. 4: 

“In cases of defence ’tis best to weigh
The enemy more mighty than he seems: 
So the proportions of defence are fill’d;
Which of a weak and niggardly projection,
Doth, like a miser, spoil his coat with scanting
A little cloth.”

Also in Hamlet, iv. 1: 

                  “So much was our love,
    We would not understand what was most fit;
    But, like the owner of a foul disease,
    To keep it from divulging, let it feed
    Even on the pith of life.”