Numquam in concilium ut possint compulsa coire
Nec remorari in concilio nec crescere adaucta[30].
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 few of his descriptions from Nature are capable of being transferred to canvas, yet he shows in his treatment of mythological subjects, and in his personification of great natural phenomena, that purely pictorial faculty, in virtue of which Catullus and Ovid have inspired the imagination and directed the hand of some of the great painters of modern times. 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. Such too are the pictures of Venus and Mars in the invocation to the poem, and that of Pan—
Pinea semiferi capitis velamina quassans[31].
By this power of vision 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[32].