has overtaken.

"Yet again, were the Nature of things suddenly to utter a voice, and thus
with her own lips upbraid one of us, 'What ails thee so, O mortal, to let
thyself loose in too feeble grievings? why weep and wail at death? for if
thy past life and overspent has been sweet to thee, and all the good
thereof has not, as if poured into a pierced vessel, run through and
joylessly perished, why dost thou not retire like a banqueter filled with
life, and calmly, O fool, take thy peaceful sleep? But if all thou hast
had is perished and spilt, and thy life is hateful, why seekest thou yet
to add more which shall once again all perish and fall joylessly away?
why not rather make an end of life and labour? for there is nothing more
that I can contrive and invent for thy delight; all things are the same
for ever. Even were thy body not yet withered, nor thy limbs weary and
worn, yet all things remain the same, didst thou go on to live all the
generations down, nay, even more, wert thou never doomed to die'--what do
we answer?"

It is in passages of which the two hundred lines beginning thus are the
noblest instance, passages of profound and majestic broodings over life
and death, that the long rolling weight of the Lucretian hexameter tells
with its full force. For the golden cadence of poesy we have to wait till
Virgil; but the strain that Lucretius breathes through bronze is
statelier and more sonorous than any other in the stately and sonorous
Roman speech. Like Naevius a century and a half before, he might have
left the proud and pathetic saying on his tomb that, after he was dead,
men forgot to speak Latin in Rome. He stands side by side with Julius
Caesar in the perfect purity of his language. The writing of the next
age, whether prose or verse, gathered richness and beauty from alien
sources; if the poem of Lucretius had no other merit, it would be a