Icti reiectant voces ad sidera mundi
Et circumvolitant equites mediosque repente
Tramittunt valido quatientes impete campos.[541]
The truth and fulness of life in this passage are immediately perceived, but the element of sublimity is added by the thought in the two lines with which the passage concludes, which reduces the whole of this moving and sounding pageant to stillness and silence—
Et tamen est quidam locus altis montibus unde
Stare videntur et in campis consistere fulgor.[542]
As Lucretius was the first poet who revealed the majesty and wonder of the Natural world, so he restored the sense of awe and mystery, felt by the earlier Greek poets, to the contemplation of human life. In dealing with the problem of human destiny, he has sounded deeper than any of the other ancient poets of Italy: but others have sympathised with a greater variety of the moods of life, and have allowed its lights and shadows to play more easily over their poetry. The thought both of the dignity and the littleness of our mortal state is ever present to the mind of Lucretius. His imagination is involuntarily moved by the pomp and grandeur of affairs, while his strong sense of reality keeps ever before him the conviction of the vanity of outward state, the weariness of luxurious living, and the miseries of ambition. Thus his imaginative recognition of the pomp and circumstance of war brings out by the force of contrast his deeper conviction of the littleness and impotence of man in the presence of the great forces of Nature—
Summa etiam cum vis violenti per mare venti
Induperatorem classis super aequora verrit