in their minds the conviction that
the gods exist far away from this world in unconcerned tranquillity
(ii. 646), and by substituting the notion of Nature for that of
deity (ii. 1090), was the object of his scientific demonstration.

Lucretius, therefore, had outgrown mythology, was hostile to
religion, and burned with unsurpassable enthusiasm to indoctrinate
his Roman readers with the weighty conclusions of systematised
materialism. Yet he chose the vehicle of hexameter verse, and
trammelled his genius with limitations which Empedocles, four
hundred years before, must have found almost intolerable. It needed
the most ardent intellectual passion and the loftiest inspiration to
sustain on his far flight a poet who had forged a hoplite's panoply
for singing robes. Both passion and inspiration were granted to
Lucretius in full measure. And just as there was something
contradictory between the scientific subject-matter and the poetical
form of his masterpiece, so the very sources of his poetic strength
were such as are usually supposed to depress the soul. His passion
was for death, annihilation, godlessness. It was not the eloquence,
but the force of logic in Epicurus that roused his enthusiasm:--

ergo vivida vis animi pervicit et extra
processit longe flammantia moenia mundi.

No other poet who ever lived in any age, or any shore, drew
inspiration from founts more passionless and more impersonal.

The 'De Rerum Natura' is therefore an attempt, unique in its kind,
to combine philosophical exposition and poetry in an age when the
requirements of the former had already outgrown the resources of the
latter. Throughout the poem we trace a discord between the matter
and the form. The frost of reason and the fire of fancy war in
deadly conflict; for the Lucretian system destroyed nearly
everything with which the classical imagination loved to play. It
was only in some high ethereal region, before the majestic thought
of Death or the new Myth of Nature, that the two faculties of the
poet's genius met for mutual support. Only at rare intervals did he
allow himself to make artistic use of mere mythology, as in the
celebrated exordium of the first book, or the description of the
Seasons in the fifth book (737-745). For the most part reason and
fancy worked separately: after long passages of scientific
explanation, Lucretius indulged his readers with those pictures of
unparalleled sublimity and grace which are the charm of