he ever-during battle of life and death haunts his imagination.
Sometimes he sets it forth in philosophical array of argument.
Sometimes he touches on the theme with elegiac pity:--

miscetur funere vagor
quem pueri tollunt visentis luminis oras;
nec nox ulla diem neque noctem aurora secutast
quae non audierit mixtos vagitibus aegris
ploratus mortis comites et funeris atri.

Then again he returns, with obstinate persistence, to describe how
the dread of death, fortified by false religion, hangs like a pall
over humanity, and how the whole world is a cemetery overshadowed by
cypresses. The most sustained, perhaps, of these passages is at the
beginning of the third book (lines 31 to 93). The most profoundly
melancholy is the description of the new-born child (v. 221):--

quare mors immatura vagatur?
tum porro puer, ut saevis proiectus ab undis
navita, nudus humi iacet, infans, indigus omni
vitali auxilio, cum primum in luminis oras
nixibus ex alvo matris natura profudit,
vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut aecumst
cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum.

Disease and old age, as akin to Death, touch his imagination with
the same force. He rarely alludes to either without some lines as
terrible as these (iii. 472, 453):--

nam dolor ac morbus leti fabricator uterquest.
claudicat ingenium, delirat lingua, labat mens.

Another kindred subject affects him with an equal pathos. He sees
the rising and decay of nations, age following after age, like waves
hurrying to dissolve upon a barren shore, and writes (ii. 75):--

sic rerum summa novatur
semper, et inter se mortales mutua vivunt,
augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur,
inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum
et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt.

Although the theme is really the procession of life through
countless generations, it obtains a tone of sadness from the sense
of intervenient decay and change. No Greek had the heart thus to
dilate his imagination with the very element of death. What the
Greeks commemorated when they spoke of Death was the loss of the
lyre and the hymeneal chaunt, and the passage across dim waves to a
sunless land. Nor indeed does Lucretius, like the modern poet of
Democracy, ascend into the regions of ecstatic trance:--

Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.

He keeps his re