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 with companions among the mountains,[9] or sharing a rustic meal stretched at ease on the grass by a running brook.[10] 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, drawing the elements of being together by the might of an all-permeating Love. And thus Lucretius, the culminating expression of the scientific 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.
III
MOUNTAIN SCENERY IN KEATS
III
MOUNTAIN SCENERY IN KEATS