gifted with the strength, the conquering temper, the
uncompromising haughtiness, and the large scale of his race.
Holding, as it were, the thought of Greece in fee, he administers
the Epicurean philosophy as though it were a province, marshalling
his arguments like legionaries, and spanning the chasms of
speculative insecurity with the masonry of hypotheses. As the arches
of the Pont du Gard, suspended in their power amid that solitude,
produce an overmastering feeling of awe; so the huge fabric of the
Lucretian system, hung across the void of Nihilism, inspires a sense
of terror, not so much on its own account as for the Roman sternness
of the mind that made it. 'Le retentissement de mes pas dans ces
immenses voutes me faisait croire entendre la forte voix de ceux qui
les avait baties. Je me perdais comme un insecte dans cette
immensite.' This is what Rousseau wrote about the aqueduct of
Nismes. This is what we feel in pacing the corridors of the
Lucretian poem. Sometimes it seems like walking through resounding
caves of night and death, where unseen cataracts keep plunging down
uncertain depths, and winds 'thwarted and forlorn' swell from an
unknown distance, and rush by, and wail themselves to silence in the
unexplored beyond. At another time the impression left upon the
memory is different. We have been following a Roman road from the
gate of the Eternal City, through field and vineyard, by lake and
river-bed, across the broad intolerable plain and the barren tops of
Alps, down into forests where wild beasts and barbarian tribes
wander, along the marge of Rhine or Elbe, and over frozen fens, in
one perpetual straight line, until the sea is reached and the road
ends because it can go no further. All the while, the iron
wheel-rims of our chariot have jarred upon imperishable paved work;
there has been no stop nor stay; the visions of things beautiful and
strange and tedious have flown past; at the climax we look forth
across a waste of waves and tumbling wilderness of surf and foam,
where the storm sweeps and hurrying mists drive eastward close above
our heads. The want of any respite, breathing-space, or intermission
in the poem, helps to force this image of a Roman journey on our
mind. From the first line to the last there is no turning-point, no
pause of thought, scarcely a comma, and the whole breaks off:--

rixantes potius quam corpora desererentur:

as though a scythe-sweep from the arm of Death had cut the