Can there be elsewhere slumber half so sound?”
John Mason Good.
Lucretius reasons plausibly, but on some points, it is too evident, unsatisfactorily even to himself. His work contains much that is worthy of praise, but this only makes its atheistical tendencies more dangerous. It was left unfinished at the poet’s death, to be revised and edited by other hands.
The style of Lucretius is not uniformly harmonious; some of his verses lack polish, and he inclines to antique forms. Yet it is dignified, luminous, and animated; glows with all the poet’s enthusiasm, and is marked by tenderness and pathos. The pictures drawn are so real as to awaken the emotions that would be experienced on beholding the originals. Schlegel gives Lucretius high praise: “As a painter and worshipper of nature, he is the first of all the poets of antiquity.”
In the extract given below, the touching description of the cow searching for her calf that has been offered in sacrifice, will show how he dignifies commonplace subjects:—
VARIETY IN NATURE.
“Thus Nature varies; man, and brutal beast,
And herbage gay, and silver fishes mute,
And all the tribes of heaven, o’er many a sea,
Through many a grove that wing, or urge their song