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

Washington Irving

Could tell the hour by his movements as accurately as by a sun-dial.

Around him like a sun of a system.

Buried like a cauliflower.

Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters, who, like deer, goats, and divers other graminivorous animals, gain their subsistance by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity.

The ravenous shark, darting, like a spectre, through the blue waters.

Falsetto, like the notes of a split reed.

Happiness is reflective, like the light of heaven; and every countenance, bright with smiles, and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmitting to others the ways of a supreme and evershining benevolence.

Lovely as seraphs.

Sweet is the memory of departed friends. Like the mellow rays of the declining sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.

Shrunk away as a frost-bitten apple.

Shrunk away, within him, like a dried filbert in its shell.

Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface.

As superior … as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson.

Good temper, like a sunny day, sheds a brightness over everything; it is the sweetener of toil and the soother of disquietude.

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