Nature of Things | Page 8

but accidents those twain produce. A property is that which not at all Can be disjoined and severed from a thing Without a fatal dissolution: such, Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow To the wide waters, touch to corporal things, Intangibility to the viewless void. But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth, Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else Which come and go whilst nature stands the same, We're wont, and rightly, to call accidents. Even time exists not of itself; but sense Reads out of things what happened long ago, What presses now, and what shall follow after: No man, we must admit, feels time itself, Disjoined from motion and repose of things. Thus, when they say there "is" the ravishment Of Princess Helen, "is" the siege and sack Of Trojan Town, look out, they force us not To admit these acts existent by themselves, Merely because those races of mankind (Of whom these acts were accidents) long since Irrevocable age has borne away: For all past actions may be said to be But accidents, in one way, of mankind,- In other, of some region of the world. Add, too, had been no matter, and no room Wherein all things go on, the fire of love Upblown by that fair form, the glowing coal Under the Phrygian Alexander's breast, Had ne'er enkindled that renowned strife Of savage war, nor had the wooden horse Involved in flames old Pergama, by a birth At midnight of a brood of the Hellenes. And thus thou canst remark that every act At bottom exists not of itself, nor is As body is, nor has like name with void; But rather of sort more fitly to be called An accident of body, and of place Wherein all things go on.
CHARACTER OF THE ATOMS
Bodies, again, Are partly primal germs of things, and partly Unions deriving from the primal germs. And those which are the primal germs of things No power can quench; for in the end they conquer By their own solidness; though hard it be To think that aught in things has solid frame; For lightnings pass, no less than voice and shout, Through hedging walls of houses, and the iron White-dazzles in the fire, and rocks will burn With exhalations fierce and burst asunder. Totters the rigid gold dissolved in heat; The ice of bronze melts conquered in the flame; Warmth and the piercing cold through silver seep, Since, with the cups held rightly in the hand, We oft feel both, as from above is poured The dew of waters between their shining sides: So true it is no solid form is found. But yet because true reason and nature of things Constrain us, come, whilst in few verses now I disentangle how there still exist Bodies of solid, everlasting frame- The seeds of things, the primal germs we teach, Whence all creation around us came to be. First since we know a twofold nature exists, Of things, both twain and utterly unlike- Body, and place in which an things go on- Then each must be both for and through itself, And all unmixed: where'er be empty space, There body's not; and so where body bides, There not at all exists the void inane. Thus primal bodies are solid, without a void. But since there's void in all begotten things, All solid matter must be round the same; Nor, by true reason canst thou prove aught hides And holds a void within its body, unless Thou grant what holds it be a solid. Know, That which can hold a void of things within Can be naught else than matter in union knit. Thus matter, consisting of a solid frame, Hath power to be eternal, though all else, Though all creation, be dissolved away. Again, were naught of empty and inane, The world were then a solid; as, without Some certain bodies to fill the places held, The world that is were but a vacant void. And so, infallibly, alternate-wise Body and void are still distinguished, Since nature knows no wholly full nor void. There are, then, certain bodies, possessed of power To vary forever the empty and the full; And these can nor be sundered from without By beats and blows, nor from within be torn By penetration, nor be overthrown By any assault soever through the world- For without void, naught can be crushed, it seems, Nor broken, nor severed by a cut in twain, Nor can it take the damp, or seeping cold Or piercing fire, those old destroyers three; But the more void within a thing, the more Entirely it totters at their sure assault. Thus if first bodies be, as I have taught, Solid, without a void, they must be then Eternal; and, if