With those who come to thee,
Balms floating on thy mountain air
And healing sights to see.'[360]
But we may trust with even more confidence to the indications of his inner than of his outward life. The spirit and purpose which impelled Lucretius to expound his philosophy can be understood without any collateral knowledge of his history. The dominant impulse of his being is the ardent desire to emancipate human life from the fears and passions by which it is marred and degraded. He has more of the zeal of a religious reformer than any other ancient thinker, except one who in all his ways of life was most unlike him, the Athenian Socrates. The speculative enthusiasm which bears him along through his argument is altogether subsidiary to the furtherance of his practical purpose. Even the poetical power to which the work owes its immortality was valued chiefly as a pleasing means of instilling the unpalatable medicine of his philosophy[361] into the minds and hearts of unwilling hearers. It is the constant presence of this practical purpose, and the profound sense which he has of the actual misery and degradation of human life, and of the peace and dignity which are attainable by man, that impart to his words the peculiar tone of impassioned earnestness to which there is no parallel in ancient literature.
Among his personal characteristics none is more prominent than his consciousness both of the greatness of the work on which he was engaged, and of his own power to cope with it. The passage in which his high self-confidence is most powerfully proclaimed (i. 920, etc.), has been imitated both by Virgil and Milton. The sense of novelty, adventure, and high aspiration expressed in the lines—
Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo—
moved Virgil less powerfully in speaking of his humbler theme—
Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis
Raptat amor;