Urgerive superne obtritum pondere terrae,—
at ii. 569-580, by the sad and solemn movement of the close,
Ploratus mortis comites et funeris atri,—
and at i. 101, by the line of cardinal significance, which ends a passage of most finished power and beauty,—
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
The music of Lucretius is altogether his own. As he was the first among his countrymen who contemplated in a reverential spirit the majesty of Nature and the more solemn meaning of life, so he was the first to call out the full rhythmical majesty and deep organ-tones of the Latin language, to embody in sound the spiritual emotions stirred by that contemplation.
The poetical style of Lucretius is, like his rhythm, a true and powerful symbol of his genius. Though his diction is much less studied than that of Virgil, yet his large use of alliterations, assonances, asyndeta[3], etc., shows that he consciously aimed at producing certain effects by recognised rhetorical means. The attraction which the artifices of rhetoric had for his mind is as noticeable in his style as a similar attraction is in the speeches of Thucydides. But neither Lucretius nor Thucydides can be called the slave of rhetorical forms. In both writers recourse is had to them for the legitimate purpose of emphasising thought, not for that of disguising its insufficiency. The use of such phrases, for instance, as 'sed casta inceste,' 'immortalia mortali sermone notantes,' 'mors immortalis,' etc., is no mere play of words, but rather the tersest phrase in which an impressive antithesis of thought can be presented. The mannerisms of his style, if they show that he was not altogether emancipated from archaic rudeness, afford evidence also of the prolific fertility of his genius. The amplitude and unchecked volume of his diction flow out of the mental conditions, described in the lines,—
Usque adeo largos haustus e fontibu' magnis
Lingua meo suavis diti de pectore fundet.
And he had not only the 'suavis lingua diti de pectore'; he had also the 'daedala lingua,'—the formative energy which shapes words into new forms and combinations. The frequent ἅπαξ λεγόμενα in his poem and his abundant use of compound words, such as fluctifragus, montivagus, altitonans, etc., most of which fell into disuse in the Augustan age, were products of the same creative force which enabled Plautus and Ennius to add largely to the resources of the Latin tongue. In him, more than in any Latin poet before or after him, we meet with phrases too full of imaginative life to be in perfect keeping with the more sober tones and tamer spirit of the national literature. Thus his language never became trite and hackneyed, and, as we read him, no medium of after-associations is interposed between his mind and our own.