The master-word in this passage is _nequiquam_. 'To desire the
impossible,' says the Greek proverb, 'is a disease of the soul.'
Lucretius, who treats of physical desire as a torment, asserts the
impossibility of its perfect satisfaction. There is something almost
tragic in these sighs and pantings and pleasure-throes, and
incomplete fruitions of souls pent up within their frames of flesh.
We seem to see a race of men and women such as have never lived,
except perhaps in Rome or in the thought of Michel Angelo,[2]
meeting in leonine embracements that yield pain, whereof the climax
is, at best, relief from rage and respite for a moment from
consuming fire. There is a life daemonic rather than human in those
mighty limbs; and the passion that bends them on the marriage bed
has in it the stress of storms, the rampings and the roarings of
leopards at play. Or, take again this single line:--

et Venus in silvis iungebat corpora amantum.

What a picture of primeval breadth and vastness! The _vice
egrillard_ of Voltaire, the coarse animalism of Rabelais, even the
large comic sexuality of Aristophanes, are in another region: for
the forest is the world, and the bodies of the lovers are things
natural and unashamed, and Venus is the tyrannous instinct that
controls the blood in spring. Only a Roman poet could have conceived
of passion so mightily and so impersonally, expanding its sensuality
to suit the scale of Titanic existences, and purging from it both
sentiment and spirituality as well as all that makes it mean.

[1] A fragment preserved from the _Danaides_ of AEschylus
has the thought of Aphrodite as the mistress of love in
earth and sky and sea and cloud; and this idea finds a
philosophical expression in Empedocles. But the tone of
these Greek poets is as different from that of Lucretius
as a Greek Hera is from a Roman Juno.

[2] See, for instance, his meeting of Ixion with the
phantom of Juno, or his design for Leda and the Swan.

In like manner, the Lucretian conception of Ennui is wholly Roman:--

Si possent homines, proinde ac sentire videntur
pondus inesse animo quod se gravitate fatiget,
e quibus id fiat causis quoque noscere et unde
tanta mali tamquam moles in pectore constet,
haut ita vitam agerent, ut nunc plerumque videmus
quid sibi quisque velit nescire et quaerere semper
commutare locum quasi onus deponere possit.
exit saepe foras magnis ex aedibus i