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 attributes 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[33].
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[34]. 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.
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[35],—
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.