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THE 
 
 POETRY OF LUCRETIUS 
 
 A LECTUKH 
 
 DKI.U KKH) AT THK JOHN RVLANDS l.lUkAKY ON THK 
 UTH IKHRUARY. 191- 
 
 C. H. HERFORD, M.A., Lin.D. 
 
 ttSOR 0» BNOLISli Lrr««ATtlir AND LAXUt'AOl: IS lilt VICT 
 L'NIVCaairV 0» MANCHCtTtll 
 
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iiJzL'^^J^ 
 
PA 
 
 I HL POEIKY Ul- LUCRETIUS. 
 By C H. HERFOKD. MA, Li i i U . 
 
 Professor ok English LirfcRAiuRK and Lancuagc in ihh 
 Victoria University oi Manchester. 
 
 DcdKAlcd ID llir 
 
 Kt. Hon. Viscount Morley. O.M. 
 Chaiuellor of the ('nnwrsity of MamlusUi. 
 
 " LiHrdiut itudi alooe in (he cootrovmial lorce and enetgy with %><uch ihe gcniiu u. »- (a.K.. 
 uiiptm hia. (nJ Iruiiioimi inlo lubiiree rcuoai lor firm acl. to long •< livng brctlh n o«r>. 
 lh<- ihoughl ihal ihr die oi • nun i< no more lK<n ihe dirwn dt • thadow." 
 
 I. 
 
 THtRt wa!> a lime when iho title ol this pa|K.-i would havr 
 Ikth rrceivcd as a paradox if not as a contradiction in 
 terms. Lcssing, as is well known, declared roundly that 
 Lucretius was " a versifier, not a poet."' and Leasing was one of the »^ 
 greatest of European critics. It is easy, indeed, to sec the reason of 
 Leuing's trenchant condemnation. It reflects his implicit acceptance 
 of Aristotle's I'oilu v, which he said was for him as absolutely valid 
 as Euclid, and therefore of Anstotlc's dtKtnnc that poetry is imita- 
 tion of human action. Lcssing s insistence on this doctrine was 
 extraordinarily salutary in his day, and definitely lowered the status 
 uf the dubiou^i kinds known as descriptive, allegoncal. satirical, and 
 didactic [xjetry. m a century tix) much given to them all. That 
 phrase of his about the imitation of human action marked out a 
 coiTccl, well-defined, and vife channel for the stream of poetry to pur- 
 sue, and some of the slender poetic rills of his generation improved 
 their chance of survival by falling into it and Rowing between its 
 banks. But Lesstng did not reckon with the power of poetic gcniu> 
 to force its own way to the sea through no matter how tangled and 
 
 An cJAboration of the Lecture delivered in the John l<>laDd< Library 
 on 14 February, 1917. 
 
 nsfioss 
 
6 THK JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 tortuous a river-bed, -nay, to capture from the very obstructions it over- 
 comes new splendours of foam and rainbow unknown perhaps to the 
 well-regulated stream. In plain language, he did not reckon with the 
 fact that a prima facie inferior form, such as satire or didactic, may 
 not only have its inferiority outweighed by compensating beauties, but 
 may actually elicit and provoke beauties not otherwise to be had, and 
 thus become not an obstacle, but an instrument of poetry. Nor did 
 he foresee that such a recovery of poetic genius, such an effacement of 
 the old boundaries, such a withdrawal of the old taboos, was to come 
 with the following century, nay, was actually impending when he 
 wrote. Goethe, who read the Laokoon entranced, as a young student 
 at Leipzig, honoured its teaching very much on this side of idolatry 
 when he came to maturity. As a devoted investigator of Nature, who 
 divined the inner continuity of the flower and the leaf with the same 
 penetrating intuition which read the continuity of a man, or of a his- 
 toric city, in all the phases of their growth, Goethe was not likely to 
 confine poetry within the bounds either of humanity or of the drums 
 and tramplings, the violence, passion, and sudden death, for which 
 human action in poetic criticism has too commonly stood. He him- 
 self wrote a poem of noble beauty on the " Metamorphosis of Plants" 
 (1 797) — a poem which suffices to show that it is possible to be poeti- 
 cally right while merely unfolding the inner truth of things in perfectly 
 adequate speech.' We cannot wonder, then, that Lucretius and the 
 poem " On the Nature of Things" excited in the greatest of German 
 poets the liveliest interest and admiration. On the score of subject 
 alone he eagerly welcomed the great example of Lucretius. But he 
 saw that Lucretius had supreme gifts as a poet, which would have 
 given distinction to whatever he wiote, and which, far from being 
 balked by the subject of his choice, found in it peculiarly large scope 
 and play. " What sets our Lucretius so high," he wrote (1821) to 
 his friend v. Knebel, author of the first German translation. " what 
 sets him so high and assures him eternal renown, is a lofty faculty of 
 sensuous intuition, which enables him to describe with power ; in 
 
 ' Goethe probably never heard of a less fortunate adventure in that 
 kind by his English contemporary Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the Ln'cs of llic 
 P/aiit's, which had then been famous m England for ten years; a poem 
 which suffices to show that it is possible to exploit in the description of 
 natural processes ail the figures and personifications of poetry, and yet to 
 go egregiousl}' wrong. 
 
THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS 7 
 
 addition, hr dis|)Ov>, ol a fxjwrrful imagination, which enable* him 
 to pursue what he ha'* seen beyond the reach o( sense into the invisible 
 depths of Nature and her most mysterious reccMc*." ' But while 
 Goethe thus led the way in endorsing without reserve the Lucretian 
 conception of what the field of poetry might legitimately include, 
 he contributed to the dixcus-sion nothing, m far as I know, so illu- 
 minating or so profound as the great saying of Wordsworth : " poetry 
 is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all sci- 
 ence ". For Wordsworth here sweeps peremptorily away the bound- 
 ary marks set up, for better or worse, by ancient criticism he knows 
 nothing of a poetry purely of man or purely of action : he finds the 
 Hifffrentici of poetry not in any particular choice of subject out of the 
 field of real things, but in the iwf<iissioniti handling of them whence- 
 soever drawn, and therefore including the impassioned handling of 
 reality as such, or, in the Lucretian phrase, of ///<• n.ihi't of //lin:;^. 
 What did he mean by i»it>a.^<toiifti •' Something more, certainly, 
 than the enthusiasm of a writer possessed with his theme, or even of 
 one eager, as Lucretius was, to effect by its means a glorious purgation 
 in the clotted soul of a friend. We come nearer when we recall the 
 profound emotion stirred in Wordsworth by " earth's tears and mirth, 
 her humblest mirth and tears," or the thought, " too deep for tears," 
 given him bv the lowliest flower of the field. Such pas.sion as this 
 is not easily analysed, but it implies something that wr may call par- 
 ticipation on the one side and response on the other. The poet finds 
 himself in Nature, finds there something that answers to spiritual needs 
 of his own. The measure of the poet's mind will be the measure of 
 ihe value of the response he receives. A small poet will people 
 Nature with fantastic shapes which reflect nothing but his capricious 
 fancy or his self-centred desires. I hat is not finding a response in 
 Nature, but putting one into her mouth ; a procedure like that of the 
 bustling conversationalist who, instead ol listening to your explanation, 
 cuts it short with a " You mean to say ' whatever it suits him to 
 suppov. But the poet of finer genius will neither seek nor be satisfied 
 with such hollow response as this. If he finds himself in Nature, it 
 will not l»e his shallow fancies or fussing regrets that he finds, but his 
 furthest reach, and loftiest appetency of soul. He will not properly 
 be said to " subdue things to the mind." as Bacon declared it to be 
 ToKnebel. 14 February. 1821. 
 
8 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 the characteristic aim of poetry to do, instead of, like philosophy, 
 subduing the mind to things. But he will feel after analogies to 
 mind in the universe of things which mind contemplates and 
 interprets. 
 
 Such an analogy, for instance, is the sense of continuity underlying 
 the changing show of the material world, corresponding to the con- 
 tinuity of our own self-consciousness through the perpetual variations 
 of our soul states. The doctrine of a permanent substance persisting 
 through the multiplicity of Nature, and giving birth to all its passing 
 modes, belongs as much to poetry as to philosophy, and owes as much 
 to impassioned intuition as to a priori thought. Under the name of 
 the " One and the Many " the problem of Change and Permanence 
 perplexed and fascinated every department of Greek thought : it pro- 
 voked the opposite extravagances of Heracleitos, who declared change 
 to be the only form of existence, and of the Eleatics, who denied 
 that it existed at all , but it also inspired the ordered and symmetrical 
 beauty of the Parthenon and the Pindaric ode. " When we feel the 
 poetic thrill," says Santayana, "it is when we find fulness in the 
 concise, and depth in the clear ; and that seems to express with 
 felicitous precision the genius of Hellenic art." 
 
 A second such analogy is the discovery of infinity. Common 
 sense observes measure and rule, complies with custom, and takes its 
 ease when its day's work is done ; but we recognize a higher quality 
 in the love that knows no measure, in the spiritual hunger and thirst 
 which are never stilled. Therefore, at the height of our humanity, 
 we find ourselves in the universe in proportion as it sustains and gives 
 scope for an endlessly ranging and endlessly penetrating thought. 
 The Stoics looked on the universe as a globe pervaded by what 
 Munro unkindly calls a rotund and rotatory god ; at the circum- 
 ference of which all existence, including that of space, simply 
 stopped ; common sense revolts, but imagination is even more rudely 
 balked, and we glory in the defiant description of Epicurus passing 
 beyond the flaming walls of the world. Yet we are stirred with a 
 far more potent intellectual sympathy when the idea is suggested, say 
 by Spinoza, that space and time themselves are but particular modes 
 of a universe which exists also in an infinite number of other ways ; 
 or when, in the final cantos of Dante's Paradiso, after passing up 
 from Earth, the centre, through the successive ever-widening spheres 
 
THK POETRY OF LUCRETIUS 9 
 
 that cjrclr round il, till wt- reach the Elmpyrean, the whole per- 
 spective and structure of the universe are suddenly inverted, and v*c 
 see the real centre, God. as a single point of da^/ling intensity, 
 irradiating existence " through and through ". Then we realize that 
 the space we have been laboriously traversing is only the illusive 
 medium of our sense- existence, and without meaning for the Eternity 
 and Infinity of divine reality. 
 
 This example has led us to the verge of another class of poetic 
 ideas, those in which poetry discovers in the world not merely 
 analogies of mind, but mind itself. This is the commonest, and in 
 some of its phases the cheapest and poorest, intellectually, of all poetic 
 ideas. It touches at one pole the naive personation which peoples 
 earth and air for pnmitive man with spirits whom he secies by ritual 
 and magic to propitiate or to circumvent. The brilliant and beautiful 
 woof of myth is, if we will, poetry as well as religion ; the primi- 
 tive and rudimentary poetry of a primitive and rudimentary religion. 
 Yet it points, however crudely, to the subtler kinds of response which 
 a riper poetic insight may discover. If the glorious anthropomorphism 
 of Olympus and .'Xsgard has faded for ever, the myster>' of life, 
 everywhere pulsing through Nature, and perpetually reborn " in man 
 and beast and earth and air and sea," cries to the poet in every 
 monufnt of his experience with a voice which will not be put by, and f 
 the symbols from soul-life by which he seeks to convey his sense of ^ 
 it. if they often read human personality too definitely into the play of 
 that elusive mystery, yet capture something in it which escapes the 
 reasoned formulas of science, and justify the claim of poetic experience 
 to be the source of an outlook upon the world, of a vision of life, with 
 which, no less than with those reached through philosophy and 
 religion, civilization has to reckon. 
 
 rhe poetic consciousness of soul has thus left a deep impress upon 
 the medium of ideas through which we currently regard both Nature 
 and Man. Il has imbued with a nrher significance and a livelier 
 appeal those analogies in Nature of which 1 s{X)kc ; turning the sublime 
 but bare conceptions of continuity and substance into Wordsworth's 
 soitulhitii; iHort- litff^lx mt^rfustd, or Shelley's /.<».<• . . . through 
 the tvfh of /u-ini^ hliuiHy ;i-(Kr turning the abstraction of infinity 
 into limitle<(s aspiration, or into that " infinite passion " which Brown- 
 ing felt across " the pain of finite hearts that veam '". 
 
10 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 On the other hand, in its interpretation of Man, the poetic soul- 
 consciousness, so extraordinarily intense on the emotional and imagina- 
 tive side, has lifted these aspects of soul into prominence ; illuminating 
 and sustaining everywhere the impassioned insight which carries men 
 outside and beyond themselves, in heroism, m prophecy, in creation, 
 in love ; which makes the past alive for them, and the future urgent ; 
 which lifts them to a vision of good and evil beyond that of moral 
 codes ; to the perception that danger is the true safety, and death, as 
 Rupert Brooke said, " safest of all " ; which in a word gives wing and 
 scope and power to that in man which endures, as the stream endures 
 though its water is ever gliding on, and makes us " feel that we are 
 greater than we know ". 
 
 I have tried to sketch out some of the ways in which a scientific 
 poetry is possible without disparagement to either element in the de- 
 scription- Let me now proceed to apply some of these ideas to the 
 great poet of science who is our immediate subject. 
 
 II. 
 
 In this assembly it is unnecessary to recall the little that is 
 told, on dubious authority, of the life which began a little less than a 
 hundred years before the Christian era, and ended when he was not 
 much over forty, when Virgil was a very young man. All that is 
 told of his life is the story that he went mad after receiving a love- 
 philtre, composed the books of his great poem " On the Nature of 
 Things " in his lucid intervals, and finally died by his own hand. 
 It is this tradition which Tennyson with great art has worked up 
 into his noble poem. We need not here discuss the truth either of 
 the tradition of madness or of that of suicide. What is certain is 
 that no poem in the world bears a more powerful impress of coherent 
 and continuous thought. While the poets of his own time and of the 
 next generation, though deeply interested in his poetry and in his 
 ideas, know nothing of the tragic story which first emerges in a testi- 
 mony four centuries later. 
 
 Lucretius called his poem by the bald title " Of the Nature of 
 Things". But no single term or phrase can describe the aims which, 
 distinct but continually playing into and through one another, compose 
 the intense animating purpose of the book. We may say that it is 
 at once a scientific treatise, a gospel of salvation, and an epic of 
 
IHL mt TRY OK LUCKt nUS 1 1 
 
 nature and man ; yd wr are raicly conscious of any one o( lh«e 
 aims lo the exclusion of tfie rent. In none of these three aim* wa* 
 Lucretius wholly original. In each ot them he had a great precursoi 
 among lh»- >>[>cculative thinkers and poet^ of Greece. H»s Mucncc 
 roughly s()eaking v/d» the creation of Deinocntu-> ; hi!> no^n:\ of 
 salvation wa* the work <>f tpicurus ; and the greatest example of a 
 poem on the nature of things, before his. had been given by fclm|>c- 
 doclcs, the poet-philosopher of Agrigentum whom Matthew Arnold 
 made the mouthpiece of his grave and lofty hymn of nmeteenth- 
 century peiisimism. In his own country his only prcdecesMX in any 
 sense was blnnius, the old national poet who had first cast the hexa- 
 meter in the stubborn mould of Latin s(>ccch. to whom he pays char- 
 acteristically generous homage. 
 
 The atomic system of Democritus, which explained all things in 
 the universe as combinations of different kinds of material particles, 
 was a magnificent contribution to physical science, and thr fertility of 
 its essential idea is still unexhausted. It touched the problems of 
 mind and lite, of ethics and art, only indirectly, in sd far as it resolved 
 mind and all its activities into functions of matter and motion. 
 Epicurus, on the other hand, a saintly recluse, bent only upon 
 showing the way to a life of »<-rene and cheerful virtue, took over 
 '>he doctrine of the great physicist of Abdrra, without any touch of 
 dispassionate speculative interest, as that which promised most effectual 
 relief from disturbing interests and cares, and especially from the dis- 
 turbance generated by fear of the gods and of a life after death. He 
 might have gone to the great Athenian idealists of the fourth century, 
 the immortal masters not only of those who know, but of those who 
 think and labour and create, whether in science or in poetry or in 
 citizen.ship. But his aim was precisely to liberate from these distract- 
 ing energies, and allure a weary generation h-om the forum an'l the 
 workshop, evrn the studio of letters or of art, and the temple* 
 of the god>, into the choice seclusion of his garden the garden of 
 a soul at |)cace, fragrant vsith innocent and beautiful things. VlTiat 
 Epicurus added of his own to Democntus" theor>- was an accom- 
 modation not to truth but to convenience ; and the measure of his 
 scientific ardour is given by his ea.sy toleration of conflicting explana- 
 tions of the same phenomenon, provided they di»{)ense with the inter- 
 vention ol the gods. While the measure of his attachment to poe<ry 
 
J 
 
 12 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 is given by his counsel to his disciples to go past it with stopped 
 ears, as by the siren's deadly song. 
 
 It was this scientific doctrine, adopted by Epicurus in the interest 
 not of science but of his gospel of deliverance from the cares of 
 superstition, that Lucretius took over with the fervour of discipleship. 
 He was not, like Pope in the " Essay on Man, " providing an 
 elegant dress for philosophic ideas which he only half understood and 
 abandoned in alarm when they threatened to be dangerous. He 
 was the prophet of Epicureanism, and it is among the prophets of the 
 faiths by which men live and die that we must seek a parallel to the 
 passionate earnestness with which he proclaims to Memmius the 
 saving gospel of Epicurus, — to that same Memmius who a few years 
 later showed his piety to Epicurus' memory by destroying his house. 
 It was the hope of pouring the light and joy of saving truth upon the 
 mind of this rather obtuse Roman, his beloved friend, that Lucretius 
 laboured, he tells us, through the silent watches of the night, seeking 
 X, phrase and measure which might make deep and hidden things clear.' 
 But Lucretius felt and thought also as a poet and in the temper of 
 poetry. He was not leitdiw::; his poi to a good cause, nor turning 
 Greek science into Latin hexameters in order that they might be more 
 vividly grasped or more readily remembered. He was conquering a 
 new way in poetry ; striking out a virgin path which no foot before 
 his had trod. For Empedocles had had far narrower aims. And he 
 calls on the Muses for aid with as devout a faith in his poetic mission 
 in the great adventure as Milton had when he summoned Urania or 
 some greater Muse to be his guide while he attempted " things un- 
 attempted yet in prose or rhyme ". What we admire unreservedly 
 in him, declares a great French poet who died only the other day, 
 Sully-Prudhomme, is the breath of independence which sweeps through 
 the entire work of this most robust and precise of poets. 
 
 We see the temper of the poet at the outset, in the wonderful 
 transfiguration which the gentle recluse Epicurus undergoes in the 
 ardent brain of his Roman disciple. For it was of this enemy of dis- 
 turbing emotion, this quietist of paganism, this timid and debonnaire 
 humanitarian, that Lucretius drew the magnificent and astonishing 
 portrait which immediately follows the prologue of the Dc Rcrinn 
 Natura. The Lucretian Epicurus is a Prometheus, - the heroic 
 M. 140 f. 
 
 > 
 
I HL POEIRV OF LUCRETIUS 13 
 
 Greek who firnt of mortals dared lo defy and ^^ith-Oand ihc monUrou-. 
 tyrant Kcli({iun to her face. No fabled tenor could appal luni, no 
 crashing thunder, nor the anger of heaven ; these only kindled the 
 more the i-ugcr courage of his 4oul, to be the fir»t to break the bar^ 
 of Nature's gatcv So the living might of his !>oul prevailed . and he 
 passed beyond the flaming walU of the world and traversed m mind 
 and spirit the immeasurable universe ; returning thence in triumph lo 
 tell u^ what can, and what cannot, come into being : having trampled 
 under foot Religion who once crushed mankind, and lifted mankind 
 in turn by his victory up to the height of heaven. 
 
 One might well surmise that a philosophy which a poet could 
 thus ardently pnKlaim wjis itself, after all, not without the seeds and 
 « springs of poetry ; and that Lucretius in choosing to expound it in 
 verse was not staking everything on his power of making good radical 
 defects of substance by telling surface decoration or brilliant digres- 
 sioiu. He recognized, no doubt, a difference in iK>pular appeal be- 
 tween his substance and his form, and in a famous and delightful 
 passage comparer himself lo the physician who touches the edge of 
 the bitter cup wilh honey, ensnaring credulou> childhood to its ov%n 
 ^'ood. So, he tells Memmiu», he is spreading the honey of the Musc^ 
 over his difficult mailer, that he may hold him by the charm of verse 
 until the nature of things have grown clear to his sight. But Lucretius 
 IS here putting himself at the fxjint of view of the indifferent layman, 
 and especially of the rather obtuse layman whose interest he was 
 with almost pathetic eagerness seeking to capture. One guesses that 
 Memmius, like the boy, was by no means reconciled to the worm- 
 wo<xl because it was prefaced with honey ; and modem critics who, 
 like Mominsen, condemn his clioicc of subject as a blunder, come 
 near lo adopting the re>entful boy's point of view. But in the 
 splendid lines which immediately precede, though they foi-m part of 
 the same apology to Memmius, the fwel involuntarily betrays his own 1 f 
 
 vny dilfcrenl conception of the matter. The hope of glory, he says, ' ' 
 
 has kindled in his breast ihc love of the Muses. " whereby inspired 
 I am exploring a virgin soil of poetry hitherto untrodden by any foot. 
 O the joy of approaching the unsulbed springs, and (juafling ihem. O 
 the joy of culling flower* unknown, whence may be woven a splendid 
 wreath for my head, such as the Muses have arrayed no man's brows 
 withal before , first becauv I am icfxjilinw' on a ureal iheme. and 
 
14 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 I undoing the tight knot of superstition from the minds of men ; and 
 then because I convey dark matters in such transparent verse, touching 
 everything with the Muses' charm. " ' 
 
 Here, in spite of the last words, Lucretius clearly feels that his 
 matter is something more than the wormwood which he overlays with 
 honey ; it is a vast region of implicit poetry which he, first of poets, is 
 going to discover and annex ; and he rests his claim to the poetic 
 wreath he expects to win, in the first place upon this greatness of the 
 subject matter itself, and secondly, not as the wormwood and honey 
 theory would suggest, on the ingenious fancy which decorates or disguises 
 it, but on the lucid style which allows it to shine in, as through a 
 window, upon the ignorant mind. 
 
 III. 
 Let us then consider from this point of view the subject of 
 Lucretius. This subject, as he conceives it, has two aspects. On 
 the one side it is negative ; — an annihilating criticism of all the crude 
 religion founded upon fear, -fear of the gods, fear of death and of 
 something after death ; criticism delivered with remorseless power and 
 culminating in the sinewy intensity of the terrible line 
 ' Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,' 
 
 which transfixes once for all the consecrated principle of /(i/>u every- 
 where dominant in the primitive faiths, the product of man's coward- 
 ice, as magic is the product of his pride. 
 ^^^ The other aspect is constructive ; the building up of the intellec- 
 tual and moral framework of a worthy human life, by setting forth the 
 true nature of the universe, the history of life, and the development of 
 man ; in other words, the story of his struggle through the ages, with 
 the obstacles opposed to him by the power of untamed nature, by 
 wild beasts, storms, inundations, by the rivalry and antagonism of 
 other men, and by the wild unreason in his own breast. Lucretius saw 
 as clearly as any modern thinker that man's conduct of his life, whether 
 in the narrow circle of domestic happiness and personal duty, or in the 
 larger sphere of civic polity, must be based upon a comprehension of 
 the external world and of the past through which we have grown to 
 what we are ; and making allowance for his more limited resources and 
 
 ' I. 922 f. 
 
IHt POETRY OF LUCRETIUS 15 
 
 his more confined point of view, he carried it out with magniScent 
 power. So that if his puem remains in nominal intention a didactic 
 treatitc, in its inner substance and pui|>oi t it mif^fit better be dencnbcd 
 as a colossal epic o( the universe, with man for its piutdjjonist and llic 
 spectres of the gods for its vanquished Iocs ; and wanting nather 
 the heroic exultations nor the tragic dooms, neitiier the melancholy 
 over what passes nur the triumph in wfuit endures, whidi go to the 
 making of the greatest poetry. 
 
 These two aspects criticism and construction are thus most 
 intimately bound together in the poem, but can yet be considered 
 a|)art. And to each belongs its own (leculiar and distinct vein of 
 poetiy. On the whole it is the former, at first sight so mucii less 
 favourable to poetic purposes, which has most entlualled [xwterity. 
 (or the voice of Lucretius is here a distinctive, almost a solitary voice. 
 The poets for the most part have been the weavers of the veil of 
 dreams and visions in whose glamour the races of mankind have 
 walked : but here came a poet, and one of the greatest, who rent the 
 veil asunder and bade men gaze ujjon the nature of things naked ami 
 unadorned. And his austere chaunt of triumph as he pierces illusion 
 and scatters superstition, has in it sometliing more poignant and thril- 
 ling than many a song of voluptuous ecstacy or enchanted reverie. 
 , For alter all, the pasting of an old order of things and the coming oi 
 a new has always at least the interest of colossal drama, and cannot 
 leave us unmoved, however baneful wc may hold the old order to 
 have been, however we may exult in the deliverance effected by the 
 new. So Milton's celebration of the birth of Christ only reaches llie 
 heights of poetry when he is telling of the passing of the old pagan 
 divinities : 
 
 I f»e oracles are dumb. 
 
 No voice or hideous hum 
 KuDs thro the arched roof in words det.eiving. 
 
 Apollo from his •-hcinc 
 
 Can no more divine. 
 With hollow ^hnek the sleep o( Del(>liot leaving;. 
 
 No nightly trance, or breathed spell. 
 Inspires ti>e pale-eyed prieM from the prophetic cell. 
 
16 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 The lonely mountains o'er 
 And the resounding shore, 
 
 A voice of weefiing heard and loud lament ; 
 From haunted spring and dale. 
 Edged with poplar pale, 
 
 The parting genius is with sighing sent ; 
 With flower-inwoven tresses torn 
 
 The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thicket mourn. 
 Through the Christian's exultation there sounds, less consciously per- 
 haps, but more clear, the Humanist scholar's sense of tragedy and 
 pathos. In Hyperion, even more, we are made to feel the pathos of 
 the passing of the fallen divinity of Saturn and his host ; and Hyperion 
 himself, the sun-god of the old order of physical light, is more magnifi- 
 cently presented than Apollo, the sun-god of the newr order of radiant 
 intelligence and song. Lucretius, as we shall see, brings back the old 
 divinity in a sublime way of his own ; but he feels the beneficence of 
 the new order of scientific vision and inviolable law too profoundly to 
 have any sense of pathos at the passing of the reign of superstition and 
 V^ caprice. He is rather possessed with flaming wrath as he recalls the 
 towering evils of which that old regime had been guilty : the wrath 
 of a prophet, more truly divine in spirit than the divinities he assailed, 
 as Prometheus is more divine than Zeus. Again and again we are 
 reminded, as we read his great invectives, not of the sceptics mocking 
 all gods indiscriminately in the name of enlightened good sense, but of 
 a Hebrew prophet, chastising those who sacrifice to the gods of the 
 Gentiles, in the name of the God of righteousness who refuses to be 
 worshipped with offerings of blood. There is surely a spirit not far 
 remote from this in the indignant pity with which he tells, in a famous 
 and splendid passage, the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the divme biddmg, 
 as the price of the liberation of the Grecian fleet on its way to Troy. 
 
 How often has fear of the gods begotten impious and criminal acts! 
 What else was it that led the chieftains of Greece, foremost of men, 
 foully to stain the altar of Artemis with the blood of the maiden 
 iphigenia? Soon as the victim's band was bound about her virgin 
 locks, and she saw her father grief- stricken before the altar, and at 
 his side the priests concealing the knife, and the onlookers shedding 
 tears at the sight, dumb with fear she sank on her knees to the 
 ground. And it availed her nothing at that hour that she had been 
 the first to call the king by the name of father ; for she was caught 
 up by the hands of men, and borne trembling to the altar ; not to 
 
THt POETRY or LUCRETIUS 17 
 
 have a g\»d wedding hymn %ung before her when thckc ucrcd lUct 
 were uvcr, bul to br pilcously Ururk down, a victim, btained with 
 her own slainle^i blood, by the hand of a father in the very Howei 
 o( fier bridal ycais; and all in order to procuic a happy dcliTei 
 ancc might be granted to the captive tlcci. So huge a ma%» ui evilt 
 has fear of the gudi brought forth! (l. 04 101 1. 
 
 Thus the crucial proof ol the badness ol the old religions is de- 
 rived from the Kideuu<> violence done in their name to the natural and 
 beautiful pieties ol the family. 
 
 Yet. with all his fierce aversion for this baneful fear. Lucretius 
 feels profoundly how natural it is. His intense imagination enters into 
 the inmost recesses ot the human heart, and runs counter, as it vscre, to 
 the argument of his (wwerful reason ; riveting U|X)n our senses with 
 almost intolerable force the beliefs which he is himself seeking to dis- 
 pel ; so that though there is no trace of doubt or obscurity in his own 
 mind, his words need only to be set in a different context to become 
 a plea f«)r that which he is using them to refute. Thus hts very de- 
 rision of the Stoic doctrine of an all-(>crvading God is conveyed in 
 language of what one is again prompted to call Hebraic magnificence. 
 " What [Kjwer can rule the immeasurable All. or hold the leins ol 
 the ureal deep ? who can revolve the heavens and wann the earth 
 with ethereal fires ? who can be eveiywheie present, making dark the 
 -.ky and thnlling it with clashing sound . . . ? (v. I234f.|" D«>we 
 not seem to listen to an echo ol the ironical r|uestions of the Jahveh 
 of the Book of Job ? 
 
 There he feels only scorn for the believer, in spite of his involun- 
 tary imaginative hold upon the belief. But m another passage we see 
 the (MK-t himself shudder with the fear that his logic is in the act of 
 plucking up by the roots : 
 
 When we gaze upward at the great vault ol heaven, and the empyrean 
 inlaid with shining stars, and lonsidei the |>«th« of sun and moon, 
 then the dread will start into lite within uj lc»t haply it be the 
 immeasurable might of gods vthich moves the blazing stars along 
 their diverse ways. For the poverty di our reason leinpl> u> to 
 wonder whether the world was not once begotten, and whether it 
 be destined to f>eruh when its ceaseless movements have worn it 
 out. or endowed with immort.il life glide on pcr(>etually. defying 
 all the might of time And then vvhat man is there who>e heart 
 does not shrink with terror of the gods, whose limbs do not creep 
 with fear, when the (wirched earth Irembies at the lightning -itoke. 
 
18 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 and the roar of thunder rolls through the sky ! Do not the 
 peoples shudder, and haughty kings quake with fear, lest for some 
 foul deed or arrogant speech a dire penalty has been incurred 
 and the hour be come when it must be paid ? For when the 
 might of the hurricane sweeps the commander of a fleet before it 
 along the seas, with all his force of legions and elephants, does 
 he not approach the gods with prayers for their favour and helping 
 winds ; and all in vain, for often enough none the less he is 
 caught in the whirlpool and flung into the jaws of death ? So 
 utterly does some hidden power seem to consume the works of 
 man, and to trample and deride all the symbols of his glory and 
 his wrath [V. 1194 f.]. 
 
 But beyond the fear of what the gods may do to us on earth, 
 lay another more insidious and ineluctable fear, — the dread of what 
 may befall us after death. It was a main part of Lucretius's purpose 
 to meet this by showing that death meant dissolution, and dissolution 
 unconsciousness ; but men continued to dread, and this is the reason- 
 ing, equally inconclusive and brilliant, with which he confronts them : - 
 
 Therefore since death annihilates, and bars out from being altogether 
 him whom evils might befall, it is plain that in death there is nothing 
 for us to fear, and that a man cannot be unhappy who does not 
 exist at all, and that it matters not a jot whether a man has been 
 born, when death the deathless has swallowed up life that dies. 
 
 Therefore, when you see a man bewail himself that after death his body 
 will rot, or perish in flames or m the jaws of beasts, his profession 
 clearly does not ring true, and there lurks a secret sting in his 
 heart, for all his denial that he believes there is any feeling in the 
 dead. For, I take it, he does not fulfil his promise, nor follow out 
 his principle, and sever himself out and out from life, but uncon- 
 sciously makes something of himself survive. For when as a living 
 man he imagines his future fate, and sees himself devoured by birds 
 and beasts, he pities himself ; for he does not distinguish between 
 himself and the others, nor sever himself from the imagined body, 
 but imagines himself to be it, and impregnates it with his own feel- 
 ing. Hence he is indignant that he has been created mortal, nor 
 sees that there will not in reality be after death another self, to 
 grieve as a livmg being that he is dead, and feel pangs as he stand's 
 by, that he himself is lying there being mangled or consumed. 
 
 Then he supposes the dying man's friends to condole with him : 
 
 Now no more thy glad home shall welcome thee, nor a beloved wife, 
 nor sweet children run to snatch kisses, touching thy heart with 
 secret delight. No more wilt thou be prosperous in thy doings, no 
 more be a shelter to tny dear ones. A single, cruel day has taken 
 
THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS 19 
 
 from thee, haplets mAn. all ihe need o( life. So they tell you, but 
 ihcy lorgct lo add that neither for any onr of thev things wilt thou 
 any longer feel deiire |lll. H63|. 
 
 IV. . 
 
 So much then lor the first aspect of Lucretjus't poem, the 
 criticism ol the old religions. Moi.t ol the recognized and famout 
 " poetry ' of the book is connected, like the paiksages I have quoted, with 
 this negative side of his treed. But I am more concerned to show that 
 a different and not less noble vein of j>oetry was rooted in the rich 
 poMtivc appetencies of his nature ; in his acute and exquisite senses ; 
 in the vast and sublime ideas which underlay his doctrine of the 
 world ; m his intense apprehension of the zest of life ; and, on the 
 other hand, penetrating, like an invisible but (xitent spirit the texture o( 
 hi-i reasoned unconcern, his profound, unconfessed sense of the pathos 
 ol death, his melancholy in the presence of the doom of universal dis- 
 solution which he foresaw for the world and for mankind. 
 
 Let us look first at the main constructive idea ; the atomic theoiy 
 of Leucippus and Democrilus, taken over by Epicurus and expounded 
 by Lucretius. 
 
 For this theory was in effect, and probably in intention, a device 
 for overcoming that antithesis of the One and the Many, of Pennan- 
 ence and Change, of which I have spoken. The Eleatics had declared 
 that pure Being was alone real, and denied Change and Motion ; 
 Heracleitus declared that nothing was real but Change, and the only 
 perpetuity " flux ". I'he founder of atomism, Leuappus. showed that it 
 was possible to hold, in the phrase of Brownings philos<jphic Don Juan, 
 that there is in " all things change, and jx-rmanence as well." by sup[)os- 
 ing that shifting and unstable world of the senses, where all things die 
 and are born, to be comfwscd ol uncreated and indestructible elements. 
 Underlying the ceaseless fluctuations o( Nature, and life as we see 
 them, lay a continuity of eternal substance, of which they were the 
 passing modes ; one of the greatest of philosophical conceptions, Mr. 
 Santayana has called it, but one also ap[>caling profoundiv to the spea- 
 ficallv {>oetic intuition which I have described. Whether the (>ermanent / 
 apprehended through the flux of sense be a spiritual substance like ^ 
 Plato's ideas, or Shelley's " white radiance of eternity, " or whether 
 it be the constant form and function of the flowing river, as in Words- 
 worth s Diiddon sonnet , or whether, as here, il be a background 
 
20 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 of material particles perpetually combining and resolved, we have the 
 kind of intuition which gives the thrill of poetry ; we discover " sweep 
 in the concise, and depth in the clear," infinite perspectives open out in 
 the moment and in the point, and however remote the temper of 
 Spinozan mysticism may be, we yet in some sort see things " in the 
 light of eternity ". 
 
 In Lucretius this conception found a mind capable of being 
 ravished by its imaginative grandeur, as well as of pursuing it indefatig- 
 ably through the thorniest mazes of mechanical proof. The contagious 
 fervour which breathes through his poem is no mere ardour of the 
 disciple bent on winning converts, or the joy of the literary craftsman 
 as his hexameters leap forth glowing on the anvil ; it is the sacred 
 passion of one who has had a sublime vision of life and nature, and 
 who bears about the radiance of it into all the work to which he has 
 set his hand. It is not because of anything that Lucretius adds to 
 Epicurus— in theory he really adds nothing at all — that the im- 
 pression produced by his poem differs so greatly from that of all we 
 know —in fragments and at second hand, it is true — of Epicurus's 
 own writings. The ultimate principles are the same, but the accent 
 is laid at a different point. The parochial timidities of Epicurus have 
 left their traces on the Roman's page, but they appear as hardly more 
 than rudimentary survivals among the native inspirations of a man of 
 heroic mettle and valour, Roman tenacity, and native sweep of mind. 
 He cannot quite break free from some speculative foibles which 
 show the Master's shallow opportunism at its worst,- such as the 
 dictum that the sun is about as large as it looks, a lamp hung a little 
 above the earth, and daily lighted and put out ; but he becomes 
 himself when he lets his imagination soar into the infinities of time and 
 space which his faith opens out or leaves room for. It is a triumph 
 of poetry as well as of common sense when he scoffs at the Stoic 
 dogma of a Space which abruptly comes to an end ; when he stations 
 an archer at the barrier and ironically bids him shoot his arrow 
 into the nothingness beyond. Or in more sombre mood, how grave 
 an intensity he puts into a common thought, like that of the end of 
 life, by the sublimely terrible epithet iinmortal which he applies to 
 death :— 
 
 Mortalem vitam Mors cum immorlalis ademit [ill. 869). 
 or into a mere reminder that birth and death are always with us, by 
 
THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS 21 
 
 making us fet;l the endless concomitant »uccoMuri through the ages of 
 funeral wailings. and the cry of the new-born child (ll. 578). He ac- 
 cept* without question the swerving of the atoms, devised by Epicurus 
 child and man of genius at once to refute the Stoic dogma of 
 necessity ; but what |X)ssesse* his mind and imagination is not these 
 intrusions of caprice but the great continuities and uniformities ol 
 existence, which follow from the perpetual dissolution and remaking 
 of life. " Rains die, when father ether has tumbird them into the 
 lap of mother earth ; but then goodly crops spring up and trees 
 laden with fruit ; and by them we and the beasts are fed. and joyous 
 cities teem with children and the woods ring with the song of young 
 birds" (I. 250 f.j. 
 
 Only, as such passages show, Lucretius grasps these uniformities 
 and continuities not as theoretic abstractions, but as underlying con- 
 ditions of the teeming multiplicity and joyous profusion of living Nature. 
 His senses, imagination, and philosophic intellect, all phenomenally 
 acute and alert, wrought intimately together ; and he enters into and 
 exposes the Hfe of the individual thing with an intensity of insight and 
 a realistic precision and power which cjuicken us with its warm pulse, 
 and burn its image upon our brain, without ever relaxing our con- 
 sciousness that it is part of an endless process, and the incidental 
 expression of an unalterable law. For him, indeed, as for Dante, 
 individuality is an intrinsic part of law. and law of indiriduality. 
 Every being has its place and function, its " deep fixed boundaries" 
 {/trwinus allc Itiu-tfiis^. The very stone, for Dante, cleaves to thr 
 spot where it lies. And the Roman as well as the philosopher in 
 Lucretius scornfully contrasts with this Nature of minute and ubiquit- 
 ous law the fluid an^.xhaotic world of nivth. whrrr .uuthiny mipKl 
 become anything fcf. V. 1 26 f.j. 
 
 None the less, his conception of the nature of the protrvs itself does 
 insensibly undergo a change. In the mind of an exponent so richly 
 endowed and so transparently sincere, the hidden flaw in his system 
 could not but at some jxnnt disturb its imposing coherence, .'\tomism 
 could not at bottom explain life, and life poured with too abounding a 
 tide through the heart and brain of Lucretius not to sap in some tie- 
 gree thr authority of his nw>chanical calculus, and lo lend a surreptitious 
 
y 
 
 22 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 persuasiveness to inconsistent analogies derived from the animated soul. 
 Without ostensibly disturbing the integrity of his Epicurean creed, such 
 analogies have, in two ways, infused an alien colour into his poetiy 
 and alien implications into his thought. In the first place, he feels, as 
 such abounding natures will, that life " the mere living " — is some- 
 how very good, in spite of all the evils it brings in its train, and death 
 pathetic in spite of all the evils from which it sets us free. When he 
 is demonstrating that the world cannot have been made by gods, he 
 set forth its grave inherent flaws of structure and arrangement with 
 merciless trenchancy — /antd sfaf praedita culpa [v. 1 99] ; and like 
 Lear, he makes the new-born child wail because he is come into a 
 world where so many griefs await him. And no one ever urged with 
 more passionate eloquence that it is unreasonable to fear to die. None 
 the less, phrases charged with a different feeling about life continually 
 escape him. He speaks of ^^ praeclara minidi uatitra [v. 157]. 
 To begin to live is to " rise up into the divine borders of light " [l. 20]. 
 And secondly, despite his philosophical assurance, incessantly repeated, 
 that birth and death are merely different aspects of the same continu- 
 ous mechanical process, and that nothing receives life except by the 
 death of something else, " Alid ex alio reficit natura, nee ullam Rem 
 gigni patitur, nisi morte adiuta aliena " [l. 264, etc.], he cannot sup- 
 press suggestions that the creative energy of the world is akin to that 
 which with conscious desire and will brings forth the successive genera- 
 tions of Man. And so, in the astonishing and magnificent opening 
 address, the poet who was about to demonstrate that the gods lived 
 eternally remote from the life of men, calls upon Venus, the legend- 
 ary mother of his own race, as the divine power ever at work in this 
 teeming universe, the giver of increase, bringing all things to birth, from 
 the simplest corn blade to the might and glory of the Roman Empire : 
 
 Mother of the Roman race, delight of gods and men, benign Venus, 
 who under the gliding constellations of heaven fillest with thy pres- 
 ence the sea with its ships and the earth with its fruits, seeing that 
 by thy power all the races of living things are conceived and come 
 to being in the light of day, before thee O goddess the winds take 
 flight, and the clouds of heaven at thy coming, at thy feet the brown 
 earth sheds her flowers of a thousand hues, before thee the sea 
 breaks into rippling laughter, and the untroubled sky glows with 
 radiant light [l. I f.]. 
 
 So grave and impassioned an appeal cannot be treated as mere 
 
THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS 23 
 
 rhetorical ornament. If we call it figure, it is figure of the kind 
 which is not a " poetical " substitute for prose, but convey* something 
 for which no other terms are adecjuate. Lucictiu*. the exponent 
 of Epicurus, doubtless intended no hcicsy again>t the Epicurrart 
 theology ; but Lucretius, the jxjct, was cairied by his vehetnent 
 imagination to an apprehension of the creative energies of the world \ 
 s«j intense and acute that the great symbol of Venus rendered it with 
 more veracity than all that calculus of atomic movements which he 
 was about to expound, and by which his logical intellect with |)crl«tl 
 sincerity believed it to be adequately explained. 
 
 Far less astonishing than his bold rehabilitation of the g<xldc*s 
 of Love is his fetishistic feeling for the Earth, the legendary mother 
 of men. For him too, as for primeval myth, she is the " uni- 
 versal mother." who in her fresh youth brought forth flower and 
 tree, and bird and beast ; from whose body sprang finally the race 
 of man itself ; nay. he tells us how the infants crept forth, " from 
 wombs rooted in the soil." and how, wherever this happened, earth 
 yielded naturally through her pores a liquor most like to milk, " even 
 as nowadays every woman when she has given birth is filled with 
 sweet milk, because all that current of nutriment streams towards the 
 breast "(v. 788 f.|. 
 
 It is true that elsewhere Lucretius speaks with rationalistic con- J^ 
 descension of the usage which calls the Elarth a mother and divine, as 
 a phrase like Bacchus for wine or Ceres for coin, permissible so 
 long as no superstitious fear is annexed to it (ll. 632 f.]. But it is 
 plain that the Earth's motherhood had a grip upon his poet's imagina- 
 tion quite other than could be exerted by any such tag of poetic 
 diction. Doubtless the fervour with which he insists on it " There- 
 fore again and again E^ith is rightly called Mother seeing that she 
 brought forth the race of men and every beast and bird in its due 
 season," is not wholly due to poetic motives. He is eager to refute 
 the Stoic doctnnc that men were sprung from heaven. But the p<x:l 
 in him is. all the same, entranced by the subhmity of the conception 
 he is urging, and he describes it with an afflatus which dwarfs that 
 Stoic doctnnc. and makes the splendid legend of Cybele the Earth 
 Mother, elaborated by the Greek |»ets, seem puenle with all it* 
 beauty. " In the beginning Earth hath in herself the elements whence 
 watcrspnngs pouring forth their coolness perpetually renew the bound- 
 
24 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 less Sea, and whence fires arise, making the ground in many places 
 hot, and belching forth the surpassing flames of /Etna. Then she 
 bears shining corn and glad woodlands for the support of men, and 
 rivers and leaves and shining pastures for the beasts that haunt the 
 hills. Wherefore she is called the mother of the gods and mother of 
 beasts and men." [ll. 589 f.]. 
 
 This all-creating Earth is far enough no doubt from the benign 
 Nature of Wordsworth, who moulds her children by silent sympathy. 
 But it is not so remote from the Earth of Meredith, the Mother who 
 brings Man " her great venture " forth, bears him on her breast and 
 nourishes him there, but " more than that embrace, that nourishment, 
 she cannot give ". 
 
 He may entreat, aspire, 
 He may despair, and she has never heed. 
 She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need, 
 Not his desire. 
 
 Meredith too sees man, in dread of her, clutching at invisible powers, 
 as Lucretius's sea-captain in the storm makes vows to the gods. And 
 Meredith's thought that man rises by " spelling at " her laws is no less 
 Lucretian. But Meredith's story of Earth is full of hope, like his 
 story of man. It is perpetual advance. With Lucretius it is otherwise. 
 For the Earth is not only our Mother ; she is our tomb [ll. I 1 48 f.]. 
 And the eternal energy of creation is not only matched by the eternal 
 energy of dissolution, but here and now is actually yielding ground to 
 it. The Earth, so prolific in her joyous youth, is now like a woman 
 who has ceased to bear, " worn out by length of days " [v. 820 f.] 
 In the whole universe birth and death absolutely balance, the equation 
 of mechanical values is never infringed ; the universe has no history, 
 only a continuous substitution of terms. But each living thing has a 
 history, it knows the exultation of onset and the melancholy of decline ; 
 and its fear of death is not cancelled by the knowledge that in that 
 very moment and in consequence of that very fact, some other living 
 thing will be born. And thus Lucretius, feeling for our Earth as a 
 being very near to us, and with which the issues of our existence are 
 involved, applies the doctrine to her without shrinking indeed, but not 
 without a human shudder. The Earth had a beginning, and ineluct- 
 able reason forces us to conclude that she will have an end, and that 
 not by a gradual evanescence or dispersion, but by a sudden, terrific 
 catastrophe, as in a great earthquake, or world conflagration [v. 95 f.]. 
 
THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS 25 
 
 And he fceU this abrupt extinction of the Earth and it« in- 
 habitants to be tra(;ic, notwithstanding that extinction is, by hi> 
 doctrine, only the condition of creation, and that at the very 
 moment o( her ruin, some other earth will be celebratmg its glorious 
 birth. Earth has (or him a life-history, a biography, and he forget* j 
 that she is stnctly but a point at which the eternal drift of atoms ill A 
 thickened lor a time to a cluster, to be dispersed again. Thus wc 
 ->ce how this mechanical system, ardently embraced by a poet, work- 
 ing freriy upon him, and itsell coloured and transformed by his mind, i 
 ■•tuied 111 him two seemingly oppo>ed kinds of poetic emotion at once : J 
 the sublime sense of eternal existence, and the tragic pathos of sudden . I 
 doom and inexorable passing away. 
 
 Hence the nulatuholy that in Lucretius goes along with an 
 enormous sense of life. Fo say that he puts the " Nevermore " of 
 romantic sentimentality in thcplace of that dispassionate " give and take " 
 of mechanics would do wiong to the immense vnnlity which anunates 
 every line of this athlete among poets. Of the cheap melancholy of 
 discontent he knows as little as of the cheap satisfaction of complac- 
 ency, or of thai literary melancholy, where the sigh of Horace, or 
 Ronsard, or Herrick, over the passing of roses and all other beautiful 
 things covers a sly diplomatic appeal to the human rosebud to be 
 gathered while still there is time. No, the melancholy of Lucretius 
 i> like that ot Durer's " Melancholia, "Hhc sadness ol strong intellect and 
 lar-reaching vision as it contemplates the setting of the sun of time / 
 and the ebbing ol the tides of mortality ; or like Wordsworth's 
 mournful music of dissolution, only to be heard by an ear emancipated 
 from vulgar joys and fears ; or like the melancholy ol Keats, the 
 veiled goddcsA who hath her shnne in the very temple of delight, 
 the ii!i:an a/ti/i4i</, in Luaetiuss own yet more pregnant words, 
 which lurks in the very sweetness of the flower. 
 
 Fhus our " scientiTic (>ocl " appeai~s in an extraordinary if not 
 umquc way to have united the functions and temper and achievement \ 
 ol^scicncc and poetry. He " knew the causes of things," and could 1 
 let them forth with marvellous precision and resource : and the know- I 
 ledge filled him with lofty )oy as of one standing secure above the 
 welter ol doubt and fear in which the mass of men pass their livev. 
 l"o have reached this serene pmnacle of intellectual security seemed 
 to his greatest lollower Vygil a happiness beyond the reach of his 
 
26 THt JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 own more tender and devout genius, and he commemorated it in 
 splendid verses which Matthew Arnold in our own day applied to 
 Goethe : 
 
 And he was happy, if to know 
 Causes of things, and far below 
 His feet to see the lurid flow 
 Of terror and insane distress 
 And headlong fate, be happiness. 
 
 There is, it may be, something that repels us, something slightly 
 inhuman, in this kind of lonely happiness, and Lucretius does little to 
 counteract that impression when he himself compares it, in another 
 famous passage, to the satisfaction of one who watches the struggle of 
 a storm-tost ship from the safe vantage-ground of the shore. Yet 
 Lucretius is far from being the lonely egoist that such a passage might 
 suggest ; his poem itself was meant as a helping hand to lift mankind 
 to his own security : he knew what devoted friendship was, and we 
 have pleasant glimpses of him wandering v/ith companions among the 
 mountains,' or sharing a rustic meal stretched at ease on the grass by 
 a running brook.' Lucretius like his master had no social philosophy, 
 and it is his greatest deficiency as a thinker ; but he was not poor in 
 social feeling. His heart went out to men, as a physician, not coldly 
 diagnosing their disease, but eager to cure them. 
 
 And so his feeling for Nature, for the universe of things, though 
 rooted in his scientific apprehension, is not bounded by it. He seizes 
 upon the sublime conceptions which his science brought to his view,- - 
 the permanent substance amid perennial change, the infinity of space 
 and time, — and his vivid mind turns these abstractions into the radiant 
 vision of a universe to which the heaven of heavens, as the old poets 
 had conceived it, " was but a veil ". But he went further, and 
 shadowed forth, if half-consciously and in spite of himself, the yet 
 greater poetic thought, of a living power pervading the whole, draw- 
 ing the elements of being together by the might of an all-permeating 
 Love. And thus Lucretius, the culminating expression of the scien- 
 tific thinking of Democritus and of the gospel of Epicurus, foreshadows 
 Virgil, whom he so deeply influenced, and prophesies faintly but 
 perceptibly of Dante and of Shelley ; as his annihilating exposure of 
 the religions founded upon fear insensibly prepared the way for the 
 religions of hope and love. 
 
 ' IV. 575. ' II. 29. 
 
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 CATALOGUE OF THE WESTERN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE JOHN RYLANDS 
 
 LIBRARY. Part I : Latin Manuscripts. Nos. I-I85. By Montague Rhodes James, 
 
 Litt.D., etc. 2 vols. 4to. 200 plates of facsimiles. 3 guineas wl. {Shortly.) 
 
 Vol. 1 : Descriptive catalogue, with indexes of contents, place names, proper names, 
 
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 Vol. 2 : Facsimiles in collotype. 
 *„* The collection here described includes examples, of first-class quality, of the art and calli- 
 graphy of all the great schools of Europe. 
 
 BULLETIN OF THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY. A quarterly publication, which in 
 addition to notes and news respecting the Library, with lists of the most recent additions lo the 
 shelves, includes original articles by leading scholars, which are of permanent value and interest. 
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