Pictish barrows and lacustrine middensteads, remote tribes of hidden
Africa and islands of the Pacific Sea.

Such are the characteristics which, to one or another epoch of modern
times, give the poem of Lucretius so unique an interest. But for these as
for all ages, its permanent value must lie mainly in more universal
qualities. History and physical science alike are in all poetry ancillary
to ideas. It is in his moral temper, his profound insight into life, that
Lucretius is greatest; and it is when dealing with moral ideas that his
poetry rises to its utmost height. The Epicurean philosophy, in his
hands, takes all the moral fervour of a religion. The depth of his
religious instinct may be measured by the passion of his antagonism to
what he regarded as superstition. Human life in his eyes was made
wretched, mean, and cruel by one great cause--the fear of death and of
what happens after it. That death is not to be feared, that nothing
happens after it, is the keystone of his whole system. It is after an
accumulation of seventeen proofs, hurled one upon another at the reader,
of the mortality of the soul, that, letting himself loose at the highest
emotional and imaginative tension, he breaks into that wonderful passage,
which Virgil himself never equalled, and which in its lofty passion, its
piercing tenderness, the stately roll of its cadences, is perhaps
unmatched in human speech.

_"Iam iam non domus accipiet te Iaeta, neque uxor
Optima, nee dulces occurrent oscula nati
Praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent:
Non poteris factis florentibus esse, tuisque
Praesidium: misero misere" aiunt, "omnia ademit
Una dies infesta tibi tot praemia vitae...."_