ey spoke of Death was the loss of the
lyre and the hymeneal chaunt, and the passage across dim waves to a
sunless land. Nor indeed does Lucretius, like the modern poet of
Democracy, ascend into the regions of ecstatic trance:--

Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.

He keeps his reason cool, and sternly contemplates the thought of
the annihilation which awaits all perishable combinations of eternal
things. Like Milton, Lucretius delights in giving the life of his
imagination to abstractions. Time, with his retinue of ages, sweeps
before his vision, and he broods in fancy over the illimitable ocean
of the universe. The fascination of the infinite is the quality
which, more than any other, separates Lucretius as a Roman poet from
the Greeks.

Another distinctive feature of his poetry Lucretius inherited as
part of his birthright. This is the sense of Roman greatness. It
pervades the poem, and may be felt in every part; although to
Athens, and the Greek sages, Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras,
Heraclitus, and Epicurus, as the fountain-heads of soul-delivering
culture, he reserves his most magnificent periods of panegyric. Yet
when he would fain persuade his readers that the fear of death is
nugatory, and that the future will be to them even as the past, it
is the shock of Rome with Carthage that he dwells upon as the
critical event of the world's history (iii. 830):--

Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur.
et velut anteacto nil tempore sensimus aegri,
ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,
omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris oris,
_in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum
omnibus humanis esset terraque marique_,
sic:

The lines in italics could have been written by none but a Roman
conscious that the conflict with Carthage had decided the absolute
empire of the habitable world. In like manner the description of a
military review (ii. 323) is Roman: so, too, is that of the
amphitheatre (iv. 75):--

et volgo faciunt id lutea russaque vela
et ferrugina, cum magnis intenta theatris
per malos volgata trabesque trementia flutant.
namque ibi consessum caveai supter et omnem
scaenai speciem, patrum coetumque decorum
inficiunt coguntque suo fluitare colore.

The imagination of Lucretius, however, was habitually less affected
b