Dante, contrasting in respect of the
quality of mercy these two poets, one in their austere perfection, but
so different in their vision of death, and judgment, and ultimate
reward. The seer of lost worlds has written his own defence, and was
indeed but attacked to point the sharp antithesis; but Lucretius, though
he owes it to a literary feint, is very finely praised. And to me it
seems that his compassionate mood increased upon him just because he was
not emulous of the world's gifts or earnest for its pleasures, but
withdrew from the press, and lived out his few great years
contemplating apart the vicissitudes of orbs and men. He did not wait in
ante-chambers or sit at wedding feasts; but severing all entangling and
intricate threads of observance, followed the voice which called him to
solitary places of illimitable prospect. It was not through disillusion
or injustice, or wounded pride, that he walked aloof; but loneliness was
his birthright, and from the hills and headlands to which solitude
allured his steps he saw the dust of mad encounters rise to heaven, and
the rent sails of foundering galleys. He saw, and could not but be wrung
with pity for man deafened to wise counsel by the noise of vanities, and
fiercely conspiring to precipitate his doom. As he went by shore and
upland, there gathered in his mind those resonant hexameters of warning
or consolation, those similes from the life of husbandry and dumb
things, which, set like diamonds in clay, lend to the most arid
arguments their own incomparable splendour, or that homelier beauty
which instantly pierces the defences of the heart. Not diffident as we,
but of a nature so infinitely absent and reserved that in the legend
his wife must concoct a philter to remind him of his love, he is of all
the pagans the best companion for our angrier moods. An archaic and
elemental serenity is upon his language and thought, rebuking our
unprofitable petulance; if emotion gains him he finds utterance in those
tremendous periods "where single words seem to gather out of the deep
and to reverberate like thunder." As the reverberation dies away and the
clouds are pierced by the sun, the world is seen in new lights through
an air clear as upon rain-swept mountains.

As my reading is incessant, so also is my writing. For the happiness of
man is in his fertility, and of barrenness comes the worst despair. To
be happy is to have issue--children, or books written, or things
beauti