The minutest phenomena and the most gigantic forces, the changes of decay and renovation in all outward things, the growth of plants and trees, the habits of beasts rioting in a wild liberty over the mountains,—
Quod in magnis bacchatur montibu' passim,[531]—
or tended by the care and ministering to the wants of man; the life and enjoyment of the birds that gladden the early morning with their song by woods and river-banks, or that seek their food and pastime among the sea-waves;—these, and numberless other phenomena, are all contemplated and described by an eye quickened by the poetical sense of manifold and inexhaustible energy in the world.
It is not so much the beauty of form and colour, as the appearance of force and life which he reproduces. He has not, like Catullus, the pure delight of an artist in painting outward scenes. He does not express, like Virgil, the charm of old associations attaching to famous places. It is the association of great laws, not of great memories, which moves him in contemplating the outward world. Neither has he invested any particular place with the attraction which Horace has given to his Sabine home, and Catullus to Sirmio. But no ancient or modern poet has expressed more happily the natural enjoyment of beholding the changing life and familiar face of the world. No other writer makes us feel with more reality the quickening of the spirit, produced by the sunrise or the advent of spring, by living in fine weather or looking on fair and peaceful landscapes. The freshness of the feeling with which outward scenes inspire him is one of the great charms of the poem, especially as a relief to the pervading gravity of his thought. More than any poet, except Wordsworth, he seems to derive a pure and healthy joy from the common sights and sounds of animate and inanimate Nature. No distempered fancies or regrets, no vague longings for some unattainable rapture, coloured the natural aspect which the world presented to his eyes and mind.
In the descriptions of Lucretius, as in those of Homer, there is always some active movement and change represented as passing before the eye. What power and energy there are, for instance, in that of a river-flood,—(like one of equal force and truth in Burns's 'Brigs of Ayr,')—
Nec validi possunt pontes venientis aquai
Vim subitam tolerare: ita magno turbidus imbri
Molibus incurrit validis cum viribus amnis.[532]
How naturally is the pure and sparkling life of brooks and springs brought before the mind in the passage at v. 269[533], already quoted,—and again, in these lines—
Denique nota vagi silvestria templa tenebant