De Rerum Natura
- 1.80.14
With a dumb terror and a sinking knee
- 1.80.15
She dropped; nor might avail her now that first
- 1.80.16
'Twas she who gave the king a father's name.
- 1.80.17
They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl
- 1.80.18
On to the altar- hither led not now
- 1.80.19
With solemn rites and hymeneal choir,
- 1.80.20
But sinless woman, sinfully foredone,
- 1.80.21
A parent felled her on her bridal day,
- 1.80.22
Making his child a sacrificial beast
- 1.80.23
To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy:
- 1.80.24
Such are the crimes to which Religion leads.
- 1.102.1
And there shall come the time when even thou,
- 1.102.2
Forced by the soothsayer's terror-tales, shalt seek
- 1.102.3
To break from us. Ah, many a dream even now
- 1.102.4
Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life,
- 1.102.5
And trouble all thy fortunes with base fears.
- 1.102.6
I own with reason: for, if men but knew
- 1.102.7
Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong
- 1.102.8
By some device unconquered to withstand
- 1.102.9
Religions and the menacings of seers.
- 1.102.10
But now nor skill nor instrument is theirs,
- 1.102.11
Since men must dread eternal pains in death.
- 1.102.12
For what the soul may be they do not know,
- 1.102.13
Whether 'tis born, or enter in at birth,
- 1.102.14
And whether, snatched by death, it die with us,
- 1.102.15
Or visit the shadows and the vasty caves
- 1.102.16
Of Orcus, or by some divine decree
- 1.102.17
Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang,
- 1.102.18
Who first from lovely Helicon brought down
- 1.102.19
A laurel wreath of bright perennial leaves,
- 1.102.20
Renowned forever among the Italian clans.
- 1.102.21
Yet Ennius too in everlasting verse
- 1.102.22
Proclaims those vaults of Acheron to be,
- 1.102.23
Though thence, he said, nor souls nor bodies fare,
- 1.102.24
But only phantom figures, strangely wan,
- 1.102.25
And tells how once from out those regions rose
- 1.102.26
Old Homer's ghost to him and shed salt tears
- 1.102.27
And with his words unfolded Nature's source.
- 1.102.28
Then be it ours with steady mind to clasp
- 1.102.29
The purport of the skies- the law behind
- 1.102.30
The wandering courses of the sun and moon;
- 1.102.31
To scan the powers that speed all life below;
- 1.102.32
But most to see with reasonable eyes
- 1.102.33
Of what the mind, of what the soul is made,
- 1.102.34
And what it is so terrible that breaks
- 1.102.35
On us asleep, or waking in disease,
- 1.102.36
Until we seem to mark and hear at hand
- 1.102.37
Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago.
- 1.136.1
I know how hard it is in Latian verse
- 1.136.2
To tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks,
- 1.136.3
Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
- 1.136.4
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing;
- 1.136.5
Yet worth of thine and the expected joy
- 1.136.6
Of thy sweet friendship do persuade me on
- 1.136.7
To bear all toil and wake the clear nights through,
- 1.136.8
Seeking with what of words and what of song
- 1.136.9
I may at last most gloriously uncloud
- 1.136.10
For thee the light beyond, wherewith to view
- 1.136.11
The core of being at the centre hid.
- 1.146.1
This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,
- 1.146.2
Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,
- 1.146.3
Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,
- 1.146.4
But only Nature's aspect and her law,
- 1.146.5
Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:
- 1.146.6
Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.
- 1.146.7
Fear holds dominion over mortality
- 1.146.8
Only because, seeing in land and sky
- 1.146.9
So much the cause whereof no wise they know,
- 1.146.10
Men think Divinities are working there.
- 1.146.11
Meantime, when once we know from nothing still
- 1.146.12
Nothing can be create, we shall divine
- 1.146.13
More clearly what we seek: those elements
- 1.146.14
From which alone all things created are,
- 1.146.15
And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.
- 1.146.16
Suppose all sprang from all things: any kind
- 1.146.17
Might take its origin from any thing,
- 1.146.18
No fixed seed required. Men from the sea
- 1.146.19
Might rise, and from the land the scaly breed,
- 1.146.20
And, fowl full fledged come bursting from the sky;
- 1.146.21
The horned cattle, the herds and all the wild
- 1.146.22
Would haunt with varying offspring tilth and waste;
- 1.146.23
Nor would the same fruits keep their olden trees,
- 1.146.24
But each might grow from any stock or limb
- 1.146.25
By chance and change. Indeed, and were there not
- 1.146.26
For each its procreant atoms, could things have
- 1.146.27
Each its unalterable mother old?
- 1.146.28
But, since produced from fixed seeds are all,
- 1.146.29
Each birth goes forth upon the shores of light
- 1.146.30
From its own stuff, from its own primal bodies.
- 1.146.31
And all from all cannot become, because
- 1.146.32
In each resides a secret power its own.
- 1.146.33
Again, why see we lavished o'er the lands
- 1.146.34
At spring the rose, at summer heat the corn,
- 1.146.35
The vines that mellow when the autumn lures,
- 1.146.36
If not because the fixed seeds of things
- 1.146.37
At their own season must together stream,
- 1.146.38
And new creations only be revealed
- 1.146.39
When the due times arrive and pregnant earth
- 1.146.40
Safely may give unto the shores of light
- 1.146.41
Her tender progenies? But if from naught
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