throws himself upon the passion with the fury of a wild beast, and seems to rend the limbs of some material victim. Nearly as fierce is his hatred for ambition, and still more intense his loathing for superstition. The feeling of conviction with which the early Christians heaped contempt on all foregoing systems seems cold and lymphatic beside the ardor of Lucretius in proclaiming his faith, and contemning all other wisdom as filthy rags. "He was a god, a very god" (deus ille fuit deus), he exclaims of Epicurus, in the beginning of the fifth book. The fabled inventions of Ceres and Bacchus, the labors of Hercules, are as nothing. Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of Epicurus. He discovered what is more sustaining than bread and wine. And what monster slain by Hercules was so foul and ugly as Religion? The poet boasts that, like a bee, he sucks the honeyed words of Epicurus; that it is his delight "to watch through calm nights" over his master's scrolls, and in sleep to dream of them. Even "the poverty of his native tongue" (patrii sermonis egestas) but seldom gives him pause. The rudest instrument is good enough for the miner who has just struck a vein of gold. Like a true enthusiast, he exults most in the dullest part of his work. When he treats of the atoms, their colors and movement, he is ecstatic over his discoveries, "made by labor, oh, so sweet!" He dismisses objections with disdainful curtness. "This is folly" (desipere est), is a common retort, and he claims for the doctrines which he preaches a certitude greater than that of the oracles of Apollo. The Psalmist speaks of the "beauty of holiness," and the Christian hymn cries, "The veil that hides thy glory, rend." But Lucretius goes beyond them. He even fears lest the dazzling radiance of Epicurean truth might blind those to whom it should be too suddenly revealed. He hesitates to

rend the veil that hides its glory. He regards with trembling awe and halfaverted face the transfiguration of Epicurus through the medium of words. When one reads the rapturous verses in which he describes his task of "making a harsh truth less bitter," likening himself to one who smears with honey the rim of the cup of medicine which the child must drink, one cannot but be astonished at the energy of his conviction. The language of Epicurus is as gentle as the life which it inculcates. Epicurus, as well as his successors, breathes the calm of Omar Khayyám, the apathy of the East. "It is better to lie than to sit; it is better to sit than to stand; it is better to be idle than to stretch forth the hands to work." But Lucretius is like a physician who, in recommending his patient perfect rest, should rush at him, shake him, fling him on a bed, and shriek at him, "Don't stir!" Lucretius puts himself into a violent heat with his exhortation to us to keep ourselves perfectly cool. Well did Statius speak of the "towering passion of Lucretius (furor arduus Lucreti). His book is indeed "a passionate scroll written over with lamentation and woe."

The third book of the poem stalks through the valley of the shadow of death. Its theme is the blackness of death (mortis nigror), from the fear of which he longs to emancipate man. Like the hapless author of The City of Dreadful Night, he tells his fellow - men that though the Garden of Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers withered, and the fruit trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich, dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of the hand which may pluck of them when it will. He proffers then

"One anodyne for torture and despair,

The certitude of Death, which no reprieve Can put off long; and which, divinely tender, But waits the outstretch'd hand to promptly render

That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave."

sense of the Ovidian passage in the words of Tennyson) till

"this cosmic order everywhere Shatter'd into one earthquake in one day Cracks all to pieces."

Cicero indeed wrote of him, in his Epp. ad Q. Fr. ii. 9 (11), that his work was marked by brilliant flashes of genius, and yet by excellent art, a passage which shows Cicero's perfect literary judgment, but which his editors have for the most part perverted by inserting a non, and making Cicero thus deny brilliancy to his illustrious contemporary. The other writers and thinkers of Rome have regarded the poem as some triste bidental, some spot blasted with lightning. As the ancient Romans fenced off the place which Jove had smitten with his thunderbolt, lest some unwary footstep should trespass on a region accursed of God, so they kept aloof and closed their ears to the sombre strain which breathed the stern note of defiance of death. The statement of Jerome that Lucretius was maddened by a love-philter and perished by his own hand, and the other record, that he died on the day when Virgil assumed the toga of manhood, are myths of the kind so frequent in the ancient world, and have no weight save in so far as they suggest the wrath of the gods which ought to have pursued the author of the poem On the Constitution of Nature, and mark the fact that Lucretius was, as it were, the literary godfather of the poet who wrote the Georgics.

We must call to mind certain points of view which greatly mitigate the audacity of the Lucretian assault on the doctrine of a future life. This belief was not firmly held even by the most orthodox thinkers of his time. Cicero acknowledges that the letter which Sulpicius sent him on the occasion of his daughter Tullia's death embraces every source of consolation which the case admitted; yet there is no allusion in that letter to the comfort which would have been afforded by the belief in the hap

"If,"

piness of Tullia in another state. writes Sulpicius, a sad if,-"if the dead have any consciousness, the girl will be grieved to think that you persevere in obstinate grief." In a letter written a few months after, to Torquatus, Cicero speaks of death, if it should befall him in that troublous time, as being annihilation (sine ullo sensu). Even Seneca, long after the time of Lucretius, calls the immortality of the soul a beautiful dream (bellum somnium), and describes its champions as asserting rather than proving a most acceptable doctrine. The traditional pictures of the future abodes of the blest and the damned were universally discredited. Future life, even when regarded as possible, was the object, not of hope, but of fear. At best it was a sphere of ennui and inaction. The open rebels against Zeus had at least the dignity of suffering, but the rank and file of the dead languished in a world which was but a pale shadow of this,— a world without hope or aim, "a land of darkness as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness.” Even the heroic Achilles (Odyssey xi. 488) sees nothing comfortable in a future life. "Rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, with a landless man that had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that are gone." Such was the pale realm whose walls Lucretius battered with such fierce exultation, walls to which no trembling hopes looked up as to an abiding city, or a treasure house where rust and moth corrupt not, and where thieves cannot break through and steal.

A brilliant French critic, M. Patin, has used a striking phrase about the poet of Epicureanism. He says there is in Lucretius an anti-Lucretius who is forever pulling him back from the extreme consequences of his theory, and forcing him into conclusions more in accordance with his ardent and enthusiastic temperament. It will be opportune

or

here to glance at some of the manifestations of the anti-Lucretius in Lucretius. As Lucretius deprives the gods of all influence over Nature, he is obliged to account for the existence of Nature by a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But here we are surprised to meet with expressions quite inconsistent with this cold materialism. What have principles, conditions, laws (rationes, fœdera, leges), to do with the freaks of blind Chance? How can Nature be called creatrix or gubernans, "creative" "regulative," if she is bound fast in the fetters of Fate? We have even Fortuna gubernans in i. 108. What is this but a deus (or dea) ex machina, who brings about the dénouement of a drama which else would have had a lame and impotent conclusion indeed? In vi. 640 he ascribes to Nature those volcanic convulsions which he elsewhere expressly dissociates from divine influence. And what but divine influence is the hidden power (vis abdita), of which he says that it constantly tramples on human grandeur, and is seen to tread under its heel and make sport for itself of the insignia of human power"?

Nature presented by Lucretius as a mother in ii. 990 again appears as a cruel stepmother in v. 778, where she is described as casting the newly born infant, naked and weeping, on the inhospitable shore of life, more helpless than the brutes, and more able to feel and deplore its helplessness; then fostering the growth of tares and all noxious weeds, and trying to wrest from wretched man the scanty portion of the earth which she has granted him wherefrom to extract a meagre sustenance by the sweat of his brow. Everywhere Nature has the attributes of will and personality. Again, he subtilizes the soul, the soul of the soul, up to the very verge of spirituality. It is from his vivid and beautiful illustrations of the interdependence of body and soul that Virgil has taken two fine passages that in which Dido "sought

the light of heaven, and groaned when she found it ;" and that in which the fingers of the dying man twitch with the longing to grasp the hilt of the sword again.

Above all, in the clinamen of the atoms, or the causeless deviation of the atom-stream from the right line, we have an active, intelligent principle thrusting itself, in spite of his materialism, into his system. In the words of De Musset, "Malgré nous vers le ciel il faut tourner les yeux."

He is not a fatalist. He recognizes a nameless force (vis nominis expers), which he finely calls " an influence torn from the grasp of Necessity" (fatis avolsa voluntas), and which is not unlike Matthew Arnold's postulate of a "tendency that makes for righteousness."

The very language of Lucretius is tinged with a deep religious fervor which reminds us of Milton. We recall the “hideous hum" of the oracles when we read of "the awful state" in which the image of the divine mother of the gods is carried through with lauds, and how she "mutely enriches mortals with a blessing not expressed in words." Indeed, if the philosophy of Lucretius can be described as a poisonous plant at all, it is at least one of those venomous flowers which supply healing influences, too. There is nothing in his system of morality which can shock us except some of his theories with regard to the passion of love; and in extenuation of them we must remember how coarsely the spirit of the time regarded womanhood. Moreover, we can hardly be wrong in seeing in the poet himself evidences of the pangs of disprized love animating him with a furious hatred of the passion itself. His master, Epicurus, looked on it but as a disturbing influence; Lucretius assailed it as a bane and a curse. Not his the "tears that love can die;" his rather to heap" shards, flints, and pebbles "on the grave of love. He has a delight like that of Dean Swift in showing the seamy

side of the passion; and indeed, in this respect strongly reminds us of the great Irishman whose bones moulder in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, whose heart, as his epitaph says, "cruel indignation now no longer rends." As Thackeray says of Swift, so we may well say of Lucretius, "What a vulture it was that tore the heart of that giant!"

The true charge against Epicureanism is not that it debases morality, or makes divine philosophy

"Procuress to the lords of hell,"

but that it tends to extinguish energy by enfeebling the springs of action. According to it, passion and action are alike folly; there is no virtue but egotism; the true wisdom is apathy. The extraordinary originality of Lucretius is shown in the strenuous spirit which he breathes into this flaccid and lymphatic creed. We seem to see a St. Anthony fiercely fighting the passions that fiercely tear him; a St. Simeon Stylites who has not succeeded in quenching his ambition, but only in giving it another object, passionate in the vaunting of his victory over himself, and leaping with all the ardor of a young lover into the arms of his "passionless bride, divine Tranquillity."

It may seem strange that Lucretius should have chosen verse as the vehicle of his teaching, especially as Epicurus wrote in prose, and condemned poetry on principle. However, he had the precedent of Xenophanes and Empedocles, and, among his own countrymen, that of Ennius, who translated Epicharmus. He tells us that his design was "to make a harsh truth less bitter." Do we not find in our own time the novel forced into the service of some particular school of religious thought, and do we not meet certain purists who condemn novel-reading as a practice, but make an exception in favor of such works of fiction as embellish and promote those particular church principles which they themselves affect?

In the poem of Lucretius, beside cer

tain amusingly puerile speculations, we find real contributions to knowledge, which science now accepts, and which were truly remarkable discoveries in the time of the poet. Among the most crude is his theory of the causes of sleep, in the fourth book, to which he carefully bespeaks the attention of his readers in some very fine verses. Another passage of amusing naïveté is that in which he seeks to account for the terror manifested by the lion in the presence of the cock.

A good Epicurean does not hesitate in his choice between science and his system. Polyænus, on his conversion to Epicureanism, declared his conviction that there was no such thing as geometrical proof. Catholicism was once as thoroughgoing. I have myself seen an old edition of Newton's Principia, by a learned abbé, who took care to explain in his preface that though the conclusions of Newton constituted a good discipline for the exercise of the mental faculties, and therefore might be studied with profit, yet they must not be regarded as true, inasmuch as a bull of the holy father had spoken of the sun as revolving round the earth. In a similar spirit, Lucretius, after setting forth a theory of the antipodes with amazing scientific accuracy, rejects it as "a fond thing vainly invented" (vanus error). The same theory was afterwards repudiated by the Christian Church. It is remarkable how speculative beliefs sometimes, so to speak, change sides. Here we have Epicureanism and early Christianity arrayed hand in hand against history and science. So, again, Lucretius believes in a final destruction of the world, while the religion of his time held that it would be eternal. It is now the orthodox who maintain the Lucretian view, and the free-thinkers who take the other side. These considerations should teach us that we ought not either to embrace a scientific theory because we think we recognize in it an ally to religion, or to reject