Emily Dickinson Lexicon

MET-A-LEP'SIS, n. [Gr. μεταληψις, participation; μετα, beyond, and λαμβανω, to take.]

In rhetoric, the continuation of a trope in one word through a succession of significations, or the union of two or more tropes of a different kind in one word, so that several gradations or intervening senses come between the word expressed and the thing intended by it; as, “in one Cesar there are many Mariuses.” Here Marius, by a synecdoche or antonomasy, is put for any ambitious, turbulent man, and this, by a metonymy of the cause, for the ill effects of such a temper to the public. Bailey. Encyc.