breathing-space, or intermission
in the poem, helps to force this image of a Roman journey on our
mind. From the first line to the last there is no turning-point, no
pause of thought, scarcely a comma, and the whole breaks off:--

rixantes potius quam corpora desererentur:

as though a scythe-sweep from the arm of Death had cut the thread of
singing short.

Is, then, this poem truly song? Indeed it is. The brazen voice of
Rome becomes tunable; a majestic rhythm sustains the progress of the
singer, who, like Milton's Satan,

O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

It is only because, being so much a Roman, he insists on moving ever
onward with unwavering march, that Lucretius is often wearisome and
rough. He is too disdainful to care to mould the whole stuff of his
poem to one quality. He is too truth-loving to condescend to
rhetoric. The scoriae, the grit, the dross, the quartz, the gold, the
jewels of his thought are hurried onward in one mighty lava-flood,
that has the force to bear them all with equal ease--not altogether
unlike that hurling torrent of the world painted by Tintoretto in
his picture of the Last Day, which carries on its breast cities and
forests and men with all their works, to plunge them in a bottomless
abyss.

Poems of the perfect Hellenic type may be compared to bronze
statues, in the material of which many divers metals have been
fused. Silver and tin and copper and lead and gold are there: each
substance adds a quality to the mass; yet the whole is bronze. The
furnace of the poet's will has so melted and mingled all these ores,
that they have run together and filled the mould of his imagination.
It is thus that Virgil chose to work. He made it his glory to
realise artistic harmony, and to preserve a Greek balance in his
style. Not so Lucretius. In him the Roman spirit, disdainful,
uncompromising, and forceful, had full sway. We can fancy him
accosting the Greek masters of the lyre upon Parnassus, deferring to
none, conceding nought, and meeting their arguments with proud
indifference:--

tu regere imperio populos Romane memento.

The Roman poet, swaying the people of his thoughts, will stoop to no
persuasion, adopt no middle course. It is not his business to
please, but to command; he will not wait upon the [Greek: kairos],
or court opportunity; Greeks m