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

Frederick William Faber

Beautiful … as childhood’s dream.

Black as night when the tempests pass.

Bright and barren as the sea,
Bare of sorrow, bare of glee.

Broken up like baffled dreams.

Eager as men, when haply they have heard
Of some new songster, some gay-feathered bird,
That hath o’er blue seas strayed in hope to find
In our thin foliage here a summer home,
Fain would they catch the bright things in their mind,
And cage them into sonnets as they come.

Fixed like a statue on his marble throne.

Fresh as the wells that stand in natural rock in summer woods or violet-scented grove.

Fret as in a cage.

Gleamed like the flocks of cloudlets bright in sunny air at morn.

Glow like webs of golden tissue in the sun.

Gloriously inflamed … like an aerial mist across the sky.

Pale and thin as an autumn moon.

Pearly pale,
Like a white transparent veil.

Float quietly, like Angels winnowing by.

Rose like a bewildering strain of oriental music.

Silent and troubled, like a man who feels he hath done that which he shall one day rue.

Soft as the songs of some shy hidden bird
From the low fields of woodlands nightly heard.

Soothing as the breath of spring.

That dream is in my heart, stirring, like spring within the unconscious earth setting the unborn summer in array.

Sway, like a trim galley, at her anchorage between two seas.

As thick as the sands of the wide wilderness.

Tingling, like cords of shaken lyres.

Twinkled
Like a smooth golden lake breeze-wrinkled.

Ubiquitous, like law’s dread majesty.

Unreal as a dream.

White as snow-wreath in the eye of spring.

Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD