Pinea semiferi capitis velamina quassans,[527]—
showing that he might have rivalled Catullus and Ovid as a poet of creative fancy, had he not felt himself more powerfully called to interpret the laws and facts of Nature. By this power of imagination he presents that superstition against which all the weight of his argument is directed, not as an abstraction, but as a real palpably existing Power of evil—
Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans.[528]
So, too, in his vivid account of the orderly procession of the seasons, he invests the freshness and the beauty of spring with the charm of personal and human associations in the lines—
It ver et Venus, et veris praenuntius ante
Pennatus graditur zephyrus, vestigia propter
Flora quibus mater praespargens ante viai
Cuncta coloribus egregiis et odoribus opplet.[529]
But it is in describing actual scenes and actual aspects of human life that Lucretius chiefly employs his power of poetical conception and expression. He looks upon the world with an eye which discerns beneath the outward appearances of things the presence of Nature in her attributes both of majesty and of genial all-penetrating life,—as at once the 'Magna mater' and the 'alma mater' of all living things[530]. She appears to his imagination not as an abstraction, or a vast aggregate of forces and laws, but as a living Power, whose processes are on an infinitely grander scale, but are yet analogous to the active and moral energies of man. He shows the same sympathy with this life of Nature, the same vivid sense of wonder and delight in her familiar aspects, the same imaginative perception of her secret agency, which led the early Greek mind to people the world with the living forms of the old mythology, and which have been felt anew by the great poets of the present century. All natural life is thus endowed with a poetical interest, as being a new manifestation of the creative energy, which is the fountain of all beauty and delight in the world.