lden words together from the rolls of Epicurus,"
"who outshines other wise men as the sun obscures the stars."
Like Ennius, Lucretius disdains the mythological lore with which
poetry was overloaded by Alexandrinism, and requires nothing
from his reader but a knowledge of the legends generally current.(16)
In spite of the modern purism which rejected foreign words from poetry,
Lucretius prefers to use, as Ennius had done, a significant Greek word
in place of a feeble and obscure Latin one. The old Roman alliteration,
the want of due correspondence between the pauses of the verse and those
of the sentence, and generally the older modes of expression
and composition, are still frequently found in Lucretius' rhythms,
and although he handles the verse more melodiously than Ennius,
his hexameters move not, as those of the modern poetical school,
with a lively grace like the rippling brook, but with a stately slowness
like the stream of liquid gold. Philosophically and practically
also Lucretius leans throughout on Ennius, the only indigenous poet
whom his poem celebrates. The confession of faith of the singer
of Rudiae(17)--

-Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus-:--

describes completely the religious standpoint of Lucretius,
and not unjustly for that reason he himself terms his poem
as it were the continuation of Ennius:--

-Ennius ut noster cecinit, qui primus amoeno
Detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam,
Per gentis Italas hominum quae clara clueret-.

Once more--and for the last time--the poem of Lucretius is resonant
with the whole poetic pride and the whole poetic earnestness
of the sixth century, in which, amidst the images of the formidable
Carthaginian and the glorious Scipiad, the imagination of the poet
is more at home than in his own degenerate age.(18) To him too
his own song "gracefully welling up out of rich feeling" sounds,
as compared with the common poems, "like the brief song of the swan
compared with the cry of the crane";--with him too the heart swells,
listening to the melodies of its own invention, with the hope
of illustrious honours--just as Ennius forbids the men to whom
he "gave from the depth of the heart a foretaste of fiery song,"
to mourn at his, the immortal singer's, tomb.

It is a remarkable fatality, that this man of extraordinary talents,
far superior in originality of poetic endowments to most