Nature of Things | Page 4

in the end when each is overthrown. This ultimate stock we have devised to name Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things, Or primal bodies, as primal to the world. I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare An impious road to realms of thought profane; But 'tis that same religion oftener far Hath bred the foul impieties of men: As once at Aulis, the elected chiefs, Foremost of heroes, Danaan counsellors, Defiled Diana's altar, virgin queen, With Agamemnon's daughter, foully slain. She felt the chaplet round her maiden locks And fillets, fluttering down on either cheek, And at the altar marked her grieving sire, The priests beside him who concealed the knife, And all the folk in tears at sight of her. With a dumb terror and a sinking knee She dropped; nor might avail her now that first 'Twas she who gave the king a father's name. They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl On to the altar- hither led not now With solemn rites and hymeneal choir, But sinless woman, sinfully foredone, A parent felled her on her bridal day, Making his child a sacrificial beast To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy: Such are the crimes to which Religion leads. And there shall come the time when even thou, Forced by the soothsayer's terror-tales, shalt seek To break from us. Ah, many a dream even now Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life, And trouble all thy fortunes with base fears. I own with reason: for, if men but knew Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong By some device unconquered to withstand Religions and the menacings of seers. But now nor skill nor instrument is theirs, Since men must dread eternal pains in death. For what the soul may be they do not know, Whether 'tis born, or enter in at birth, And whether, snatched by death, it die with us, Or visit the shadows and the vasty caves Of Orcus, or by some divine decree Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang, Who first from lovely Helicon brought down A laurel wreath of bright perennial leaves, Renowned forever among the Italian clans. Yet Ennius too in everlasting verse Proclaims those vaults of Acheron to be, Though thence, he said, nor souls nor bodies fare, But only phantom figures, strangely wan, And tells how once from out those regions rose Old Homer's ghost to him and shed salt tears And with his words unfolded Nature's source. Then be it ours with steady mind to clasp The purport of the skies- the law behind The wandering courses of the sun and moon; To scan the powers that speed all life below; But most to see with reasonable eyes Of what the mind, of what the soul is made, And what it is so terrible that breaks On us asleep, or waking in disease, Until we seem to mark and hear at hand Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago. SUBSTANCE IS ETERNAL
This terror, then, this darkness of the mind, Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light, Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse, But only Nature's aspect and her law, Which, teaching us, hath this exordium: Nothing from nothing ever yet was born. Fear holds dominion over mortality Only because, seeing in land and sky So much the cause whereof no wise they know, Men think Divinities are working there. Meantime, when once we know from nothing still Nothing can be create, we shall divine More clearly what we seek: those elements From which alone all things created are, And how accomplished by no tool of Gods. Suppose all sprang from all things: any kind Might take its origin from any thing, No fixed seed required. Men from the sea Might rise, and from the land the scaly breed, And, fowl full fledged come bursting from the sky; The horned cattle, the herds and all the wild Would haunt with varying offspring tilth and waste; Nor would the same fruits keep their olden trees, But each might grow from any stock or limb By chance and change. Indeed, and were there not For each its procreant atoms, could things have Each its unalterable mother old? But, since produced from fixed seeds are all, Each birth goes forth upon the shores of light From its own stuff, from its own primal bodies. And all from all cannot become, because In each resides a secret power its own. Again, why see we lavished o'er the lands At spring the rose, at summer heat the corn, The vines that mellow when the autumn lures, If not because the fixed seeds of things At their own season must together stream, And new creations only be revealed When the due times arrive