United States or Chile ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He valued spirit, energy, pomp, stateliness of form and diction, and actually thought Dryden's fine lines about to-morrow being falser than the former clay equal to any eight lines in Lucretius. But his words truly express the effect of the Prelude on more vulgar minds than his own.
Lucretius was elected consul, who being very old, and his strength being inadequate to discharge the consular duties, dies in a few days. M. Horatius Pulvillus was substituted in the room of Lucretius. In some old writers I find no mention of Lucretius as consul; they place Horatius immediately after Brutus.
There is the lyric temperament, as exemplified in writers like Sappho, Shelley, and others; there is the meditative temperament—sometimes speculative, but not always accompanied by metaphysical dreaming—as exemplified in Lucretius, Wordsworth, and others; and there is the dramatic temperament, as exemplified in Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare.
For instance, certain atoms may be so arranged at one time as to produce fire, and, at another time, the arrangement of the same atoms may be such that the result is a fir-tree. The differences between the colours of things are said by Lucretius to be due to differences in the arrangements and motions of atoms.
For Virgil, like Lucretius, is no trifler: he uses verse as a serious vehicle for impressing his conviction; he acknowledges, so to say, the responsibility of his calling, and writes in poetry because poetry is the clothing of his mind.
Universitas: but though the context seems tempting, it is too early for "university" as a translation. I.e. in citizenship. I.e. in speech. Why livescentibus I am not sure. "Bruised by the rough mail"? But Lucretius has digiti livescunt: and Sidonius, like other poets of other decadences, is apt to borrow the phrases of his great predecessors.
Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare will always make their own way with all fit readers sooner or later: it is not so with Meleager or Macrobius or Marmontel, with William Langland or with Thomas Love Peacock. But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all important as was the influence of the one upon the other.
How this terrible religion for such it was in all living detail, though we make, and the ancients then made, an artistic use of the more attractive bits of it weighed on man, the great poem of Lucretius, the most of a nineteenth-century poem of any in antiquity, brings before us with a feeling so vivid as to be almost a feeling of our own.
The massive Roman vigour of treatment which shone forth in the Annals and made them as it were a rock-hewn monument of Rome's glory, secured to Ennius a far greater posthumous renown than that of any of the other early poets. Cicero extols him, and has no words too contemptuous for those who despise him, Lucretius praises him in the well known words
They saw and felt the incongruities of the world as a moral administration, and sometimes pressed the inquiry, as in Job, Why does Yahveh thus? But the denial of any ruling personal Will, as by Lucretius, was impossible to them. They were imaginative, intense, and their imagination got the saving ethical impress especially from the prophets.
Word Of The Day