We see then a two-fold hyperbole in the expression that a man is more timid than a Phrygian hare.
However, this latter is a hyperbolewhich every one makes use of; thus we say thrice-happy and thrice-miserable.
In this weakness of hyperbole the Irish Sagas are outdone only by the monstrous doings of the epics of India.
Hence it is necessary to know where to draw the line; for if ever it is overstepped the effect of the hyperbole is spoilt, being in such cases relaxed by overstraining, and producing the very opposite to the effect desired.
We can see that these circumstances have not been dragged in to produce a hyperbole, but that the hyperbole has grown naturally out of the circumstances.
We may repeat here what we said about figures, and say that the hyperbole is then most effective when it appears in disguise.
Before such specimens as this the hyperbole of Seneca seems tame and insignificant.
Conscious of this inevitable difficulty, and with all the rhetorician's morbid fear of being commonplace, Lucan betakes himself to desperate remedies, hyperbole and padding.
Hyperbole is when a thing is magnified above the truth,"--Adam, p.
In hyperbole the step between the sublime and the ridiculous is often a very short one; yet the rose and lily simile is perpetrated by erotic poets to this day.
Where women are looked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbole cannot be sincere; it is either nothing but "spruce affectation" or else an illustration of the power of sensual love.
The amorous hyperbole of the ancients is romantic in the sense of fanciful, fictitious, extravagant, but not in the sense in which I oppose romantic love to selfish sensual infatuation.
However this may be, either is strong enough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole in literature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, "speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love.
Apart from such grotesque comparisons of the face to the moon, or of the teeth to the lotos, there is nothing in the amorous hyperbole of Hindoo poets that rises above the voluptuous into the neighborhood of esthetic admiration.
This phase of amorous hyperbolealso was known to the ancient poets.
In the use of hyperbole it is very difficult to avoid the step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Nothing can be more unlike poetic hyperbole than the sum of actual miles marched to the men who trod them; and these very concrete miles were the gauge of the lapse of time.
This hyperbole is evidently a mere fiction joined on to a truth for the purpose of frightening the proud into humility.
But even here, the colossal scenery and the magnificenthyperbole of the language suit not the experience of an individual, but the extremities of that vast gulf of exile into which a whole nation was plunged.
Those that remain may be attributed partly to the poetic hyperbole of Joel’s style, and partly to the fact that he sees in the plague far more than itself.
There are conditions in which it is scarcely a hyperbole to say that slavery itself is a stage on the road to freedom.
The place was a residence, but by no stretch of hyperbole could you call it a home.
In any other sense it would be a specimen of more than Persian or Moghul hyperbole and bombast, of which there is no other instance in Scripture, and which no Christian would dare to attribute to an inspired writer.
The hyperboleemployed startles and arouses the attention and drives the lesson home.
Eulogy kindles eulogy; hyperbole is heaped on hyperbole; a ludicrous importance is attached to every trifle which falls, or which ever has fallen, from this Press-created Fetish.
One seems to find more of oriental hyperbole in the Castilian poetry.
A simile, a trope, a metaphor, even a hyperbolewill do.
As to the argument drawn from the alleged extravagance of the hyperbole in verse 25, it has no weight.
Most of his best things are either the most audacious yet triumphant specimens of the hyperbole to be found in literature or they are pieces of sheer nonsense.
The great poets follow Nature as closely in this love of the hyperbole as they do in other matters.
I had not been long in the country ere I learnt to estimate all this hyperbole at its just value; and once having done so, I found reason to feel grateful for many unexpected and unsought courtesies.
A thousand brilliant baubles were spread out before us—a thousand harangues replete with hyperbole were exhausted on us—all was bustle and excitement; and I forgot for a while the weeping father and the spirit-stricken apostate of Solimaniè.
The Pasha obeyed not; he believed this coldness to be only a caprice of his Imperial bride, and he lost himself in all the lover-like hyperbole which he doubted not would be expected from him.
In order to express the strength of this antimoral power in a few words, to portray it, so to say, at one stroke, some very emphatic hyperbole is wanted.
But Hamlet uses no hyperbole when he says: "To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man pick'd out of ten thousand.
Oh no; that is a littlehyperbole perhaps--my little tendency to hyperbole.
No, that is a little hyperbole perhaps--my little tendency to neatness and epigram.
Hyperbole in the language of Montrose is a mean instrument made mighty because wielded by an afflicted soul, and strangeness is here the order of Nature.
