Infidi maris insidias virisque dolumque
Ut vitare velint, neve ullo tempore credant,
Subdola cum ridet placidi pellacia ponti,
Sic tibi si finita semel primordia quaedam
Constitues, aevom debebunt sparsa per omnem
Disiectare aestus diversi materiari,
Numquam in concilium ut possint compulsa coire
Nec remorari in concilio nec crescere adaucta.[526]
It is through the penetrating intuition of his imagination into the deepest meaning of the two phenomena, and his sensibility to the pathos and the strangeness involved in each of them, that he sees the birth of every child into the world under the well-known image of the shipwrecked sailor—'saevis proiectus ab undis.' Other analogies, suggested rather than elaborately drawn out, express an inward or spiritual, not an outward or bodily resemblance. Or rather the thing illustrated is a thought or a mental act, the illustration a scene or action, visible to the eye, suggestive of the same power in Nature, and calculated to rouse the same emotions in the mind. Thus he compares the life transmitted in succession through the nations of the world to the torch passed on by the runners in the torch-race; or he illustrates his calm contemplation of the struggles of life from the heights of his Epicurean philosophy, by the vision of the dangers of the sea, as seen from some commanding position on the land.
Although his subject did not afford much scope for the exercise of the idealising faculty of a poetical artist, yet there are some passages in the poem conceived with the finest pictorial power. Such, for instance, is the representation of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, suggested indeed, in some of its features, by an earlier poet, but executed with original power. There are also one or two pictures from the ancient mythology, as that of Venus and Mars in the invocation to the poem, and that of Pan—