For men, though strong and fair to look upon, Oft follow in the retinue of wealth.
Religious feelings were fostered by visions and dreams; marvellous shapes to which savage man ascribed supernatural powers. Recurrent appearances of such shapes induced a belief in their continuous existence: so arose the notion of gods that live for ever.
Our navigation, tillage, walls, and laws, Our armour, roads, and dress, and such-like boons, And every elegance of modern life, Poems and pictures, statues deftly wrought, All these men learned with slow advancing steps From practice and the knowledge won by wit. So by degrees time brings each thing to sight, And reason raiseth it to realms of day. In arts must one thing, then another, shine, Until they win their full development.
FOOTNOTES:
[V] To the Roman poet Titus Corus Lucretius (99-55 B.C.) belongs the distinction of having made Epicureanism epic. Possessed by a desire to free his fellow men from the trammels of superstition and the dread of death, he composed his poem, "On the Nature of Things." His reasonings were based on the atomic theory, which the Greek Epicurus had taken as the physical side of his system. In natural law Lucretius found the true antidote to superstition, and from a materialistic hypothesis of atoms and void he deduced everything. Against the futilities of myth-religion he protested with the fervour of an evangelist. On the ethical side, he accepted from Epicurus the conception that the ideal lies in pleasure—not wild, sensual pleasure, but that calm of mind which comes from temperate and refined enjoyment, subdual of extravagant passion, and avoidance of political entanglements. It is appropriate that the life of this apostle of scientific quietism should be involved in obscurity. The story of his insanity, so beautifully treated by Tennyson, may or may not be true. It is hardly credible that a work so closely reasoned was, as a whole, composed in lucid intervals between fits of madness; but, on the other hand, there are signs of flagging in the later portions, and the work comes to a sudden conclusion. The translations are specially made by Prof. J. Wight Duff, and include a few extracts from his "Literary History of Rome."