Is it metaphor
to say that the boy asked the servant to do this, or is it not
rather pedantry to insist on the letter of a bond and deny its
spirit, by denying that language passed, on the ground that the
symbols covenanted upon and assented to by both were uttered and
received by eyes and not by mouth and ears? When the lady drank to
the gentleman only with her eyes, and he pledged with his, was there
no conversation because there was neither noun nor verb? Eyes are
verbs, and glasses of wine are good nouns enough as between those
who understand one another. Whether the ideas underlying them are
expressed and conveyed by eyeage or by tonguage is a detail that
matters nothing.
But everything we say is metaphorical if we choose to be captious.
Scratch the simplest expressions, and you will find the metaphor.
Written words are handage, inkage and paperage; it is only by
metaphor, or substitution and transposition of ideas, that we can
call them language. They are indeed potential language, and the
symbols employed presuppose nouns, verbs, and the other parts of
speech; but for the most part it is in what we read between the
lines that the profounder meaning of any letter is conveyed.
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