haut igitur leti præclusa est ianua cælo
nec soli terræque neque altis æquoris undis,
sed patet immani et vasto respectat hiatu.
The ever-during battle of life and death haunts his imagination. Sometimes he sets it forth in philosophical array of argument. Sometimes he touches on the theme with elegiac pity:—
miscetur funere vagor
quem pueri tollunt visentis luminis oras;
nec nox ulla diem neque noctem aurora secutast
quæ non audierit mixtos vagitibus ægris
ploratus mortis comites et funeris atri.
Then again he returns, with obstinate persistence, to describe how the dread of death, fortified by false religion, hangs like a pall over humanity, and how the whole world is a cemetery overshadowed by cypresses. The most sustained, perhaps, of these passages is at the beginning of the third book (lines 31 to 93). The most profoundly melancholy is the description of the new-born child (v. 221):—
quare mors immatura vagatur?
tum porro puer, ut sævis proiectus ab undis
navita, nudus humi iacet, infans, indigus omni
vitali auxilio, cum primum in luminis oras
nixibus ex alvo matris natura profudit,
vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut æcumst
cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum.
Disease and old age, as akin to Death, touch his imagination with the same force. He rarely alludes to either without some lines as terrible as these (iii. 472, 453):—
nam dolor ac morbus leti fabricator uterquest.
claudicat ingenium, delirat lingua, labat mens.
Another kindred subject affects him with an equal pathos. He sees the rising and decay of nations, age following after age, like waves hurrying to dissolve upon a barren shore, and writes (ii. 75):—
sic rerum summa novatur
semper, et inter se mortales mutua vivunt,
augescunt aliæ gentes, aliæ minuuntur,
inque brevi spatio mutantur sæcla animantum
et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt.
Although the theme is really the procession of life through countless generations, it obtains a tone of sadness from the sense of intervenient decay and change. No Greek had the heart thus to dilate his imagination with the very element of death. What the Greeks commemorated when they spoke of Death was the loss of the lyre and the hymeneal chaunt, and the passage across dim waves to a sunless land. Nor indeed does Lucretius, like the modern poet of Democracy, ascend into the regions of ecstatic trance:—