“O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
    ’Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
    Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars! 
    Thou ever young, fresh, lov’d, and delicate wooer,
    Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
    That lies on Dian’s lap! thou visible god,
    That solder’st close impossibilities,
    And mak’st them kiss! that speak’st with every tongue,
    To every purpose!  O thou touch of hearts! 
    Think, thy slave man rebels; and by thy virtue
    Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
    May have the world in empire!”
                                 Timon of Athens, iv. 3.

Shakespeare’s boldness in metaphors is pretty strongly exemplified in some of the forecited passages; but he has instances of still greater boldness.  Among these may be named Lady Macbeth’s—­

                       “Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry Hold, hold!”

Here “blanket of the dark” runs to so high a pitch, that divers critics, Coleridge among them, have been staggered by it, and have been fain to set it down as a corruption of the text.  In this they are no doubt mistaken:  the metaphor is in the right style of Shakespeare, and, with all its daring, runs in too fair keeping to be ruled out of the family.  Hardly less bold is this of Macbeth’s—­

                   “Heaven’s cherubin, hors’d

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.”

With these I suspect may be fitly classed, notwithstanding its delicacy, the following from Iachimo’s description of Imogen, when he comes out of the trunk in her chamber: 

                   “The flame o’ the taper

Bows toward her; and would under-peep her lids,
To see th’ enclosed lights, now canopied
Under these windows, white and azure, lac’d
With blue of heaven’s own tinct.”

Also this, from the soliloquy of Posthumus in repentance for the supposed death of Imogen by his order: 

               “My conscience, thou art fetter’d

More than my shanks and wrists:  you good gods give me
The penitent instrument to pick that bolt,
Then free for ever!”

I add still another example; from one of old Nestor’s speeches on the selection of a champion to fight with the Trojan hero: 

                         “It is suppos’d,

He that meets Hector issues from our choice: 
And choice, being mutual act of all our souls,
Makes merit her election; and doth boil,
As ’twere from forth us all, a man distill’d
Out of our virtues.”