vivid reflection of the ceaseless life and movement of nature than anything in the beautiful symbolism of Greek mythology or in the more precise formulas of modern science. Like Shelley, he renews the work of the mythopoeic imagination in the very act of repudiating its creations. In the magnificent opening hymn to Venus, without lapsing for a line from his large, stately Roman manner, he blends the Greek poets' allegorizing conception of love as an allpervading cosmic power with an incomparably warm sensuous picture of the breathing human passion of the amorous deity. His repudiation of the superstitious worship of the great mother of the gods, in the second book, combines all the pomp of Milton's enumerations of the false deities of the heathen with a deeper Wordsworthian vein of reflection on the - "springs Of that licentious craving in the mind To act the God among external things." The ten lines in which he recalls and rejects the myth of Phaethon outweigh all the labored ingenuities of the three hundred and twentyfive lines which Ovid has devoted to the theme. When, digressing from the phenomena of echo, he explains away the Italian peasant's naïve faith in the fauns and goat-footed satyrs with which his fancy peoples the "shepherd's lonely walks and solitude divine," the exquisite verses are touched by a wistful sympathy which we associate rather with modern and romantic than with classical poetry. And few passages in profane literature will so nearly sustain the comparison with the words of the Lord answering Job out of the whirlwind as the lines where, in the name of the grandeur of the infinite world, Lucretius scornfully challenges the petty faith in an anthropomorphic God "Who rolls the heavens, and lifts and lays the deep, Yet loves and hates with mortal hates and loves." This quickening spirit of imagination constrains him, despite his theories, to animate Nature too in all her parts and processes. He makes us aware of life, motion, growth everywhere. In the atoms that weave their everlasting dance like motes in the summer sun; in the shining Ether that clips the world in his greedy embrace; in the war of the elements, the winds eagerly striving to dry up all the waters, while the waters are confident that they will sooner drown the world; in the brook plashing down the mountain-side and summoning from afar by its clear murmurings the thirsty tribes of brutes, or delivering the filtered tribute of the woodland to the ocean, there to be sucked up by the sun and so precipitated again by Father Ether into the lap of Mother Earth, who thence bears on her bounteous breast the smiling harvests and the frisking flocks; in the life of man climbing 9309 ever to maturity, only to decline from life's topmost stair as the vital forces fail under the ceaseless rain of hostile atoms impingent from without. By virtue of this imaginative vision, and this sense of Nature's omnipresent life, she becomes for him a personal, guiding, artistic power,- Nature that sits at the helm, Nature manifold in works, a being far more nearly akin to the immanent Platonic worldsoul than to the mathematical sum of colorless Democritean atoms which his theory would make her. "As a poet," said Goethe, "I am a Pantheist;" and despite his nominal allegiance to atomism, the poetry of Lucretius is in spirit pantheistic. It is the "lower pantheism » half spiritualized by an intense feeling for the vital unity of nature, rather than the "higher pantheism" which sees in nature only the symbol and garment of God. But in imaginative effect it is the poetic pantheism of Bruno, Shelley, Swinburne, -nay, of Wordsworth himself in Tintern Abbey.' And to this is due much of his attraction for many of the finest minds of the Renaissance and of our own time. But Lucretius is the poet of nature in a still more special sense. Lowell truly observes that "there is obscurely in him an almost Wordsworthian" quality. Like Wordsworth, he complains of the "film of familiarity" in consequence of which we have eyes and see not; and he marvels that we can be so deadened by custom to the beauty of the starry heavens, that from satiety of the sight no man deigns to look up to the lucid quarters of the sky. And he himself notes not only the grander phenomena of nature, but her subtler aspects and minor solicitations of our senses, on which modern poetry is wont to dwell. He has marked with Coleridge "Those thin clouds above in flakes and bars He has observed with Bryant and Wordsworth how distance turns the foaming flood or the grazing flock to a motionless patch of white upon the landscape. He has seen all heaven in a globe of dew, with Shelley. Many of his lines, like those of Tennyson, come back to the lover of nature on his walks, as the inevitable and only expression of what the eye beholds. "When Tennyson went with me to Harwich,” says Fitzgerald, "I was pointing out an old collier rolling to the tune of Trudit agens magnam magno molimine navem >» (With mighty endeavor the wind drives onward the mighty vessel). And the same critic characterizes as a noble Poussin landscape the picture of summer belts of vine and olive (v. 1370-8), which Wordsworth quotes in his description of the scenery of the English lakes. To other readers Lucretius will appeal rather as the poet of man. "Satire is wholly ours," said the Roman critic. And Lucretius is a true Roman in that he is a superb rhetorical satirist—a satirist not of men but of essential man. The vanity of our luxury, the tedium of fantastic idleness, the doubtful benefits of our over-refined and sophisticated civilization, the futility of the Sisyphean labors of ambition, our idle terrors of death, the grotesque and horrible absurdity of the superstitions we dignify by the name of religion, the disenchantment that lurks behind the stage illusions of passion, the insatiate thirst for change and happiness inseparable from our very being,— what license of realistic satire could impress these things upon us as we feel them under the spell of that severe and melancholy eloquence, which reveals our puny life stripped of its conventional disguises and shivering on the shores of infinite existence, the sport of the elemental forces of the world? «Poor little life Crowned with a flower or two, and there an end." But his is not the soul-blighting satire that has no pity in it. "Poor hapless mortals" is his standing Homeric phrase for mankind, wandering blindly in the mazes of ignorance, and ridden by superstition, ennui, ambition, and false ideals of happiness. But he does not therefore preach mere cynicism and despair. "The sober majesties of settled sweet Epicurean life" are accessible to all; some few may attain the passionless calm of "students in their pensive citadels"; and the supreme spirits who pass the flaming bounds of space and time and bring back to mankind the tablets of nature's everlasting laws, lift humanity to the level of the gods. And the dignity with which his majestic melancholy invests suffering and death, by viewing them sub specie æternitatis as manifestations of the eternal laws of life, does more to rob them of their sting for some minds than the affected cheerfulness of formal optimism protesting overmuch. Frederick the Great is not the only strenuous spirit that has turned to the third book of the 'De Rerum Natura' for solace and calm. A poet's style must be studied in the original. Lucretius's models were, among the Latins, Ennius; among the Greeks, the older poets, Homer, Empedocles, Euripides, rather than the artificial Alexandrians who were in favor among his contemporaries. His sincerity, earnestness, and strength, his enthusiastic faith in his teachings, and his keen delight in the labor of "shutting reasons up in rhythm and Heliconian honey in living words," enlists the reader's attention from the start. And the poet retains it with imperious grasp as he urges on the serried files of his verse over the vast barren spaces of his theme, like Roman soldiers marching on the great white imperial roads that disdain to deviate for mountain or morass. "Some find him tedious, others think him lame; But if he lags, his subject is to blame. Rough weary roads through barren wilds he tried, Yet still he marches with true Roman pride."- ARMSTRONG. He is not yet master of the intricate harmony and the dying fall of the Virgilian poetic period, nor of the limpid felicity of Ovid; but his single mighty lines, weighted with sonorous archaic diction, and pointed with alliteration, assonance, and antithesis, possess an incomparable energy. They strike upon the sense like huge lances hurled quivering to the mark. The effect can hardly be reproduced in our monosyllabic English. "When death immortal stays the mortal pulse." "Great Scipio's son, Terror of Carthage, thunderbolt of war." "He passed beyond The unsurmounted fires that wall the world.» "The parched earth rocks beneath the thunder-stroke, "Hand on the torch of life in fiery race." "Awe from above to tame the thankless hearts And graceless spirits of the godless mob." "When Rome and Carthage clashed in shock of war." "The lion's wrath that bursts his mighty heart." "All beasts that range on all the hills o' the world." He was a His influence is to be measured by the quality rather than by the number of his readers. He « was a poet's poet among the ancients, and is a scholar's poet among the moderns." Virgil, Horace, and Manilius were his pupils in the art of writing Latin verse. Ovid, Propertius, Martial, Statius allude to him with respectful awe. chief source of inspiration to Bruno, and many of the rationalizing pantheists of the Renaissance. Montaigne quotes him on almost every page, and criticizes his fine passages with discriminating enthusiasm. Spenser and Milton know him well and often imitate him. Through Gassendi and Molière he became the standard-bearer of rationalism in the conservative and formal seventeenth century; meriting the honor of refutation by a cardinal, and the coupling of his name with that of Hobbes in denunciation by Nahum Tate. This naturally insured him the enthusiastic admiration of Voltaire and of the great Encyclopedists. The famous prosopopoeia of Nature in the 'Système de la Nature' was suggested by a passage in the third book. Dryden translated the proem of the first book; and Creech's translation made him familiar to the minor writers of the eighteenth century, as frequent allusions prove. And the nineteenth century, which cares nothing for his polemical significance, is recalled to an appreciation of his higher poetic qualities by the admiration of André Chénier, Goethe, Sully Prud'homme, Sainte-Beuve, Schérer, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Swinburne, George Eliot, Fitzgerald, Symonds, and a host of minor essayists. Munro's masterly edition and translation meets all the needs of the scholar. Kelsey's convenient school edition is much used in American colleges. Mallock's volume in 'Blackwood's Ancient Classics' offers a useful but unsympathetic summary, with specimens of a translation in Spenserian verse. Martha's Poème de Lucréce' is eloquent and interesting. Sellar's exhaustive chapters in the 'Roman Poets of the Republic' are diffuse but readable. There is an enthusiastic essay in Symonds's 'Italian Byways,' and there are short studies by Saint-Beuve and Schérer. SPENSER'S IMITATION OF THE OPENING LINES OF THE NATURE OF THINGS› REAT Venus! queen of beauty and of grace, GR The joy of gods and men, that under sky Dost fairest shine, and most adorn thy place; The raging seas, and mak'st the storms to fly: And when thou spread'st thy mantle forth on high, And heavens laugh, and all the world shows joyous cheer. Then doth the dædale earth throw forth to thee Out of her fruitful lap abundant flowers; And then all living wights, soon as they see The spring break forth out of his lusty bowers, And thee their mother call to cool their kindly rages. |