BOOK V

BOOK V

PROEM

 O WHO can build with puissant breast a song
 Worthy the majesty of these great finds?
 Or who in words so strong that he can frame
 The fit laudations for deserts of him
 Who left us heritors of such vast prizes,
 By his own breast discovered and sought out?--
 There shall be none, methinks, of mortal stock.
 For if must needs be named for him the name
 Demanded by the now known majesty
 Of these high matters, then a god was he,--
 Hear me, illustrious Memmius--a god;
 Who first and chief found out that plan of life
 Which now is called philosophy, and who
 By cunning craft, out of such mighty waves,
 Out of such mighty darkness, moored life
 In havens so serene, in light so clear.
 Compare those old discoveries divine
 Of others: lo, according to the tale,
 Ceres established for mortality
 The grain, and Bacchus juice of vine-born grape,
 Though life might yet without these things abide,
 Even as report saith now some peoples live.
 But man's well-being was impossible
 Without a breast all free. Wherefore the more
 That man doth justly seem to us a god,
 From whom sweet solaces of life, afar
 Distributed o'er populous domains,
 Now soothe the minds of men. But if thou thinkest
 Labours of Hercules excel the same,
 Much farther from true reasoning thou farest.
 For what could hurt us now that mighty maw
 Of Nemeaean Lion, or what the Boar
 Who bristled in Arcadia? Or, again,
 O what could Cretan Bull, or Hydra, pest
 Of Lerna, fenced with vipers venomous?
 Or what the triple-breasted power of her
 The three-fold Geryon...
 The sojourners in the Stymphalian fens
 So dreadfully offend us, or the Steeds
 Of Thracian Diomedes breathing fire
 From out their nostrils off along the zones
 Bistonian and Ismarian? And the Snake,
 The dread fierce gazer, guardian of the golden
 And gleaming apples of the Hesperides,
 Coiled round the tree-trunk with tremendous bulk,
 O what, again, could he inflict on us
 Along the Atlantic shore and wastes of sea?--
 Where neither one of us approacheth nigh
 Nor no barbarian ventures. And the rest
 Of all those monsters slain, even if alive,
 Unconquered still, what injury could they do?
 None, as I guess. For so the glutted earth
 Swarms even now with savage beasts, even now
 Is filled with anxious terrors through the woods
 And mighty mountains and the forest deeps--
 Quarters 'tis ours in general to avoid.
 But lest the breast be purged, what conflicts then,
 What perils, must bosom, in our own despite!
 O then how great and keen the cares of lust
 That split the man distraught! How great the fears!
 And lo, the pride, grim greed, and wantonness--
 How great the slaughters in their train! and lo,
 Debaucheries and every breed of sloth!
 Therefore that man who subjugated these,
 And from the mind expelled, by words indeed,
 Not arms, O shall it not be seemly him
 To dignify by ranking with the gods?--
 And all the more since he was wont to give,
 Concerning the immortal gods themselves,
 Many pronouncements with a tongue divine,
 And to unfold by his pronouncements all
 The nature of the world.

ARGUMENT OF THE BOOK AND NEW PROEM AGAINST A TELEOLOGICAL CONCEPT

                             And walking now
 In his own footprints, I do follow through
 His reasonings, and with pronouncements teach
 The covenant whereby all things are framed,
 How under that covenant they must abide
 Nor ever prevail to abrogate the aeons'
 Inexorable decrees,--how (as we've found),
 In class of mortal objects, o'er all else,
 The mind exists of earth-born frame create
 And impotent unscathed to abide
 Across the mighty aeons, and how come
 In sleep those idol-apparitions,
 That so befool intelligence when we
 Do seem to view a man whom life has left.
 Thus far we've gone; the order of my plan
 Hath brought me now unto the point where I
 Must make report how, too, the universe
 Consists of mortal body, born in time,
 And in what modes that congregated stuff
 Established itself as earth and sky,
 Ocean, and stars, and sun, and ball of moon;
 And then what living creatures rose from out
 The old telluric places, and what ones
 Were never born at all; and in what mode
 The human race began to name its things
 And use the varied speech from man to man;
 And in what modes hath bosomed in their breasts
 That awe of gods, which halloweth in all lands
 Fanes, altars, groves, lakes, idols of the gods.
 Also I shall untangle by what power
 The steersman nature guides the sun's courses,
 And the meanderings of the moon, lest we,
 Percase, should fancy that of own free will
 They circle their perennial courses round,
 Timing their motions for increase of crops
 And living creatures, or lest we should think
 They roll along by any plan of gods.
 For even those men who have learned full well
 That godheads lead a long life free of care,
 If yet meanwhile they wonder by what plan
 Things can go on (and chiefly yon high things
 Observed o'erhead on the ethereal coasts),
 Again are hurried back unto the fears
 Of old religion and adopt again
 Harsh masters, deemed almighty,--wretched men,
 Unwitting what can be and what cannot,
 And by what law to each its scope prescribed,
 Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.

 But for the rest,--lest we delay thee here
 Longer by empty promises--behold,
 Before all else, the seas, the lands, the sky:
 O Memmius, their threefold nature, lo,
 Their bodies three, three aspects so unlike,
 Three frames so vast, a single day shall give
 Unto annihilation! Then shall crash
 That massive form and fabric of the world
 Sustained so many aeons! Nor do I
 Fail to perceive how strange and marvellous
 This fact must strike the intellect of man,--
 Annihilation of the sky and earth
 That is to be,--and with what toil of words
 'Tis mine to prove the same; as happens oft
 When once ye offer to man's listening ears
 Something before unheard of, but may not
 Subject it to the view of eyes for him
 Nor put it into hand--the sight and touch,
 Whereby the opened highways of belief
 Lead most directly into human breast
 And regions of intelligence. But yet
 I will speak out. The fact itself, perchance,
 Will force belief in these my words, and thou
 Mayst see, in little time, tremendously
 With risen commotions of the lands all things
 Quaking to pieces--which afar from us
 May she, the steersman Nature, guide: and may
 Reason, O rather than the fact itself,
 Persuade us that all things can be o'erthrown
 And sink with awful-sounding breakage down!

 But ere on this I take a step to utter
 Oracles holier and soundlier based
 Than ever the Pythian pronounced for men
 From out the tripod and the Delphian laurel,
 I will unfold for thee with learned words
 Many a consolation, lest perchance,
 Still bridled by religion, thou suppose
 Lands, sun, and sky, sea, constellations, moon,
 Must dure forever, as of frame divine--
 And so conclude that it is just that those,
 (After the manner of the Giants), should all
 Pay the huge penalties for monstrous crime,
 Who by their reasonings do overshake
 The ramparts of the universe and wish
 There to put out the splendid sun of heaven,
 Branding with mortal talk immortal things--
 Though these same things are even so far removed
 From any touch of deity and seem
 So far unworthy of numbering with the gods,
 That well they may be thought to furnish rather
 A goodly instance of the sort of things
 That lack the living motion, living sense.
 For sure 'tis quite beside the mark to think
 That judgment and the nature of the mind
 In any kind of body can exist--
 Just as in ether can't exist a tree,
 Nor clouds in the salt sea, nor in the fields
 Can fishes live, nor blood in timber be,
 Nor sap in boulders: fixed and arranged
 Where everything may grow and have its place.
 Thus nature of mind cannot arise alone
 Without the body, nor have its being far
 From thews and blood. Yet if 'twere possible?--
 Much rather might this very power of mind
 Be in the head, the shoulders, or the heels,
 And, born in any part soever, yet
 In the same man, in the same vessel abide
 But since within this body even of ours
 Stands fixed and appears arranged sure
 Where soul and mind can each exist and grow,
 Deny we must the more that they can dure
 Outside the body and the breathing form
 In rotting clods of earth, in the sun's fire,
 In water, or in ether's skiey coasts.
 Therefore these things no whit are furnished
 With sense divine, since never can they be
 With life-force quickened.

                        Likewise, thou canst ne'er
 Believe the sacred seats of gods are here
 In any regions of this mundane world;
 Indeed, the nature of the gods, so subtle,
 So far removed from these our senses, scarce
 Is seen even by intelligence of mind.
 And since they've ever eluded touch and thrust
 Of human hands, they cannot reach to grasp
 Aught tangible to us. For what may not
 Itself be touched in turn can never touch.
 Wherefore, besides, also their seats must be
 Unlike these seats of ours,--even subtle too,
 As meet for subtle essence--as I'll prove
 Hereafter unto thee with large discourse.
 Further, to say that for the sake of men
 They willed to prepare this world's magnificence,
 And that 'tis therefore duty and behoof
 To praise the work of gods as worthy praise,
 And that 'tis sacrilege for men to shake
 Ever by any force from out their seats
 What hath been stablished by the Forethought old
 To everlasting for races of mankind,
 And that 'tis sacrilege to assault by words
 And overtopple all from base to beam,--
 Memmius, such notions to concoct and pile,
 Is verily--to dote. Our gratefulness,
 O what emoluments could it confer
 Upon Immortals and upon the Blessed
 That they should take a step to manage aught
 For sake of us? Or what new factor could,
 After so long a time, inveigle them--
 The hitherto reposeful--to desire
 To change their former life? For rather he
 Whom old things chafe seems likely to rejoice
 At new; but one that in fore-passed time
 Hath chanced upon no ill, through goodly years,
 O what could ever enkindle in such an one
 Passion for strange experiment? Or what
 The evil for us, if we had ne'er been born?--
 As though, forsooth, in darkling realms and woe
 Our life were lying till should dawn at last
 The day-spring of creation! Whosoever
 Hath been begotten wills perforce to stay
 In life, so long as fond delight detains;
 But whoso ne'er hath tasted love of life,
 And ne'er was in the count of living things,
 What hurts it him that he was never born?
 Whence, further, first was planted in the gods
 The archetype for gendering the world
 And the fore-notion of what man is like,
 So that they knew and pre-conceived with mind
 Just what they wished to make? Or how were known
 Ever the energies of primal germs,
 And what those germs, by interchange of place,
 Could thus produce, if nature's self had not
 Given example for creating all?
 For in such wise primordials of things,
 Many in many modes, astir by blows
 From immemorial aeons, in motion too
 By their own weights, have evermore been wont
 To be so borne along and in all modes
 To meet together and to try all sorts
 Which, by combining one with other, they
 Are powerful to create, that thus it is
 No marvel now, if they have also fallen
 Into arrangements such, and if they've passed
 Into vibrations such, as those whereby
 This sum of things is carried on to-day
 By fixed renewal. But knew I never what
 The seeds primordial were, yet would I dare
 This to affirm, even from deep judgments based
 Upon the ways and conduct of the skies--
 This to maintain by many a fact besides--
 That in no wise the nature of all things
 For us was fashioned by a power divine--
 So great the faults it stands encumbered with.
 First, mark all regions which are overarched
 By the prodigious reaches of the sky:
 One yawning part thereof the mountain-chains
 And forests of the beasts do have and hold;
 And cliffs, and desert fens, and wastes of sea
 (Which sunder afar the beaches of the lands)
 Possess it merely; and, again, thereof
 Well-nigh two-thirds intolerable heat
 And a perpetual fall of frost doth rob
 From mortal kind. And what is left to till,
 Even that the force of nature would o'errun
 With brambles, did not human force oppose,--
 Long wont for livelihood to groan and sweat
 Over the two-pronged mattock and to cleave
 The soil in twain by pressing on the plough.

 *****

 Unless, by the ploughshare turning the fruitful clods
 And kneading the mould, we quicken into birth,
 [The crops] spontaneously could not come up
 Into the free bright air. Even then sometimes,
 When things acquired by the sternest toil
 Are now in leaf, are now in blossom all,
 Either the skiey sun with baneful heats
 Parches, or sudden rains or chilling rime
 Destroys, or flaws of winds with furious whirl
 Torment and twist. Beside these matters, why
 Doth nature feed and foster on land and sea
 The dreadful breed of savage beasts, the foes
 Of the human clan? Why do the seasons bring
 Distempers with them? Wherefore stalks at large
 Death, so untimely? Then, again, the babe,
 Like to the castaway of the raging surf,
 Lies naked on the ground, speechless, in want
 Of every help for life, when nature first
 Hath poured him forth upon the shores of light
 With birth-pangs from within the mother's womb,
 And with a plaintive wail he fills the place,--
 As well befitting one for whom remains
 In life a journey through so many ills.
 But all the flocks and herds and all wild beasts
 Come forth and grow, nor need the little rattles,
 Nor must be treated to the humouring nurse's
 Dear, broken chatter; nor seek they divers clothes
 To suit the changing skies; nor need, in fine,
 Nor arms, nor lofty ramparts, wherewithal
 Their own to guard--because the earth herself
 And nature, artificer of the world, bring forth
 Aboundingly all things for all.

THE WORLD IS NOT ETERNAL

                           And first,
 Since body of earth and water, air's light breath,
 And fiery exhalations (of which four
 This sum of things is seen to be compact)
 So all have birth and perishable frame,
 Thus the whole nature of the world itself
 Must be conceived as perishable too.
 For, verily, those things of which we see
 The parts and members to have birth in time
 And perishable shapes, those same we mark
 To be invariably born in time
 And born to die. And therefore when I see
 The mightiest members and the parts of this
 Our world consumed and begot again,
 'Tis mine to know that also sky above
 And earth beneath began of old in time
 And shall in time go under to disaster.

 And lest in these affairs thou deemest me
 To have seized upon this point by sleight to serve
 My own caprice--because I have assumed
 That earth and fire are mortal things indeed,
 And have not doubted water and the air
 Both perish too and have affirmed the same
 To be again begotten and wax big--
 Mark well the argument: in first place, lo,
 Some certain parts of earth, grievously parched
 By unremitting suns, and trampled on
 By a vast throng of feet, exhale abroad
 A powdery haze and flying clouds of dust,
 Which the stout winds disperse in the whole air.
 A part, moreover, of her sod and soil
 Is summoned to inundation by the rains;
 And rivers graze and gouge the banks away.
 Besides, whatever takes a part its own
 In fostering and increasing [aught]...

 *****

 Is rendered back; and since, beyond a doubt,
 Earth, the all-mother, is beheld to be
 Likewise the common sepulchre of things,
 Therefore thou seest her minished of her plenty,
 And then again augmented with new growth.

 And for the rest, that sea, and streams, and springs
 Forever with new waters overflow,
 And that perennially the fluids well,
 Needeth no words--the mighty flux itself
 Of multitudinous waters round about
 Declareth this. But whatso water first
 Streams up is ever straightway carried off,
 And thus it comes to pass that all in all
 There is no overflow; in part because
 The burly winds (that over-sweep amain)
 And skiey sun (that with his rays dissolves)
 Do minish the level seas; in part because
 The water is diffused underground
 Through all the lands. The brine is filtered off,
 And then the liquid stuff seeps back again
 And all regathers at the river-heads,
 Whence in fresh-water currents on it flows
 Over the lands, adown the channels which
 Were cleft erstwhile and erstwhile bore along
 The liquid-footed floods.

                           Now, then, of air
 I'll speak, which hour by hour in all its body
 Is changed innumerably. For whatso'er
 Streams up in dust or vapour off of things,
 The same is all and always borne along
 Into the mighty ocean of the air;
 And did not air in turn restore to things
 Bodies, and thus recruit them as they stream,
 All things by this time had resolved been
 And changed into air. Therefore it never
 Ceases to be engendered off of things
 And to return to things, since verily
 In constant flux do all things stream.

                               Likewise,
 The abounding well-spring of the liquid light,
 The ethereal sun, doth flood the heaven o'er
 With constant flux of radiance ever new,
 And with fresh light supplies the place of light,
 Upon the instant. For whatever effulgence
 Hath first streamed off, no matter where it falls,
 Is lost unto the sun. And this 'tis thine
 To know from these examples: soon as clouds
 Have first begun to under-pass the sun,
 And, as it were, to rend the rays of light
 In twain, at once the lower part of them
 Is lost entire, and earth is overcast
 Where'er the thunderheads are rolled along--
 So know thou mayst that things forever need
 A fresh replenishment of gleam and glow,
 And each effulgence, foremost flashed forth,
 Perisheth one by one. Nor otherwise
 Can things be seen in sunlight, lest alway
 The fountain-head of light supply new light.
 Indeed your earthly beacons of the night,
 The hanging lampions and the torches, bright
 With darting gleams and dense with livid soot,
 Do hurry in like manner to supply
 With ministering heat new light amain;
 Are all alive to quiver with their fires,--
 Are so alive, that thus the light ne'er leaves
 The spots it shines on, as if rent in twain:
 So speedily is its destruction veiled
 By the swift birth of flame from all the fires.
 Thus, then, we must suppose that sun and moon
 And stars dart forth their light from under-births
 Ever and ever new, and whatso flames
 First rise do perish always one by one--
 Lest, haply, thou shouldst think they each endure
 Inviolable.

            Again, perceivest not
 How stones are also conquered by Time?--
 Not how the lofty towers ruin down,
 And boulders crumble?--Not how shrines of gods
 And idols crack outworn?--Nor how indeed
 The holy Influence hath yet no power
 There to postpone the Terminals of Fate,
 Or headway make 'gainst Nature's fixed decrees?
 Again, behold we not the monuments
 Of heroes, now in ruins, asking us,
 In their turn likewise, if we don't believe
 They also age with eld? Behold we not
 The rended basalt ruining amain
 Down from the lofty mountains, powerless
 To dure and dree the mighty forces there
 Of finite time?--for they would never fall
 Rended asudden, if from infinite Past
 They had prevailed against all engin'ries
 Of the assaulting aeons, with no crash.

 Again, now look at This, which round, above,
 Contains the whole earth in its one embrace:
 If from itself it procreates all things--
 As some men tell--and takes them to itself
 When once destroyed, entirely must it be
 Of mortal birth and body; for whate'er
 From out itself giveth to other things
 Increase and food, the same perforce must be
 Minished, and then recruited when it takes
 Things back into itself.

                        Besides all this,
 If there had been no origin-in-birth
 Of lands and sky, and they had ever been
 The everlasting, why, ere Theban war
 And obsequies of Troy, have other bards
 Not also chanted other high affairs?
 Whither have sunk so oft so many deeds
 Of heroes? Why do those deeds live no more,
 Ingrafted in eternal monuments
 Of glory? Verily, I guess, because
 The Sum is new, and of a recent date
 The nature of our universe, and had
 Not long ago its own exordium.
 Wherefore, even now some arts are being still
 Refined, still increased: now unto ships
 Is being added many a new device;
 And but the other day musician-folk
 Gave birth to melic sounds of organing;
 And, then, this nature, this account of things
 Hath been discovered latterly, and I
 Myself have been discovered only now,
 As first among the first, able to turn
 The same into ancestral Roman speech.
 Yet if, percase, thou deemest that ere this
 Existed all things even the same, but that
 Perished the cycles of the human race
 In fiery exhalations, or cities fell
 By some tremendous quaking of the world,
 Or rivers in fury, after constant rains,
 Had plunged forth across the lands of earth
 And whelmed the towns--then, all the more must thou
 Confess, defeated by the argument,
 That there shall be annihilation too
 Of lands and sky. For at a time when things
 Were being taxed by maladies so great,
 And so great perils, if some cause more fell
 Had then assailed them, far and wide they would
 Have gone to disaster and supreme collapse.
 And by no other reasoning are we
 Seen to be mortal, save that all of us
 Sicken in turn with those same maladies
 With which have sickened in the past those men
 Whom nature hath removed from life.

 *****
 gain,
 Whatever abides eternal must indeed
 Either repel all strokes, because 'tis made
 Of solid body, and permit no entrance
 Of aught with power to sunder from within
 The parts compact--as are those seeds of stuff
 Whose nature we've exhibited before;
 Or else be able to endure through time
 For this: because they are from blows exempt,
 As is the void, the which abides untouched,
 Unsmit by any stroke; or else because
 There is no room around, whereto things can,
 As 'twere, depart in dissolution all,--
 Even as the sum of sums eternal is,
 Without or place beyond whereto things may
 Asunder fly, or bodies which can smite,
 And thus dissolve them by the blows of might.
 But not of solid body, as I've shown,
 Exists the nature of the world, because
 In things is intermingled there a void;
 Nor is the world yet as the void, nor are,
 Moreover, bodies lacking which, percase,
 Rising from out the infinite, can fell
 With fury-whirlwinds all this sum of things,
 Or bring upon them other cataclysm
 Of peril strange; and yonder, too, abides
 The infinite space and the profound abyss--
 Whereinto, lo, the ramparts of the world
 Can yet be shivered. Or some other power
 Can pound upon them till they perish all.
 Thus is the door of doom, O nowise barred
 Against the sky, against the sun and earth
 And deep-sea waters, but wide open stands
 And gloats upon them, monstrous and agape.
 Wherefore, again, 'tis needful to confess
 That these same things are born in time; for things
 Which are of mortal body could indeed
 Never from infinite past until to-day
 Have spurned the multitudinous assaults
 Of the immeasurable aeons old.

 Again, since battle so fiercely one with other
 The four most mighty members the world,
 Aroused in an all unholy war,
 Seest not that there may be for them an end
 Of the long strife?--Or when the skiey sun
 And all the heat have won dominion o'er
 The sucked-up waters all?--And this they try
 Still to accomplish, though as yet they fail,--
 For so aboundingly the streams supply
 New store of waters that 'tis rather they
 Who menace the world with inundations vast
 From forth the unplumbed chasms of the sea.
 But vain--since winds (that over-sweep amain)
 And skiey sun (that with his rays dissolves)
 Do minish the level seas and trust their power
 To dry up all, before the waters can
 Arrive at the end of their endeavouring.
 Breathing such vasty warfare, they contend
 In balanced strife the one with other still
 Concerning mighty issues,--though indeed
 The fire was once the more victorious,
 And once--as goes the tale--the water won
 A kingdom in the fields. For fire o'ermastered
 And licked up many things and burnt away,
 What time the impetuous horses of the Sun
 Snatched Phaethon headlong from his skiey road
 Down the whole ether and over all the lands.
 But the omnipotent Father in keen wrath
 Then with the sudden smite of thunderbolt
 Did hurl the mighty-minded hero off
 Those horses to the earth. And Sol, his sire,
 Meeting him as he fell, caught up in hand
 The ever-blazing lampion of the world,
 And drave together the pell-mell horses there
 And yoked them all a-tremble, and amain,
 Steering them over along their own old road,
 Restored the cosmos,--as forsooth we hear
 From songs of ancient poets of the Greeks--
 A tale too far away from truth, meseems.
 For fire can win when from the infinite
 Has risen a larger throng of particles
 Of fiery stuff; and then its powers succumb,
 Somehow subdued again, or else at last
 It shrivels in torrid atmospheres the world.
 And whilom water too began to win--
 As goes the story--when it overwhelmed
 The lives of men with billows; and thereafter,
 When all that force of water-stuff which forth
 From out the infinite had risen up
 Did now retire, as somehow turned aside,
 The rain-storms stopped, and streams their fury checked.

FORMATION OF THE WORLD AND ASTRONOMICAL QUESTIONS

 But in what modes that conflux of first-stuff
 Did found the multitudinous universe
 Of earth, and sky, and the unfathomed deeps
 Of ocean, and courses of the sun and moon,
 I'll now in order tell. For of a truth
 Neither by counsel did the primal germs
 'Stablish themselves, as by keen act of mind,
 Each in its proper place; nor did they make,
 Forsooth, a compact how each germ should move;
 But, lo, because primordials of things,
 Many in many modes, astir by blows
 From immemorial aeons, in motion too
 By their own weights, have evermore been wont
 To be so borne along and in all modes
 To meet together and to try all sorts
 Which, by combining one with other, they
 Are powerful to create: because of this
 It comes to pass that those primordials,
 Diffused far and wide through mighty aeons,
 The while they unions try, and motions too,
 Of every kind, meet at the last amain,
 And so become oft the commencements fit
 Of mighty things--earth, sea, and sky, and race
 Of living creatures.

                     In that long-ago
 The wheel of the sun could nowhere be discerned
 Flying far up with its abounding blaze,
 Nor constellations of the mighty world,
 Nor ocean, nor heaven, nor even earth nor air.
 Nor aught of things like unto things of ours
 Could then be seen--but only some strange storm
 And a prodigious hurly-burly mass
 Compounded of all kinds of primal germs,
 Whose battling discords in disorder kept
 Interstices, and paths, coherencies,
 And weights, and blows, encounterings, and motions,
 Because, by reason of their forms unlike
 And varied shapes, they could not all thuswise
 Remain conjoined nor harmoniously
 Have interplay of movements. But from there
 Portions began to fly asunder, and like
 With like to join, and to block out a world,
 And to divide its members and dispose
 Its mightier parts--that is, to set secure
 The lofty heavens from the lands, and cause
 The sea to spread with waters separate,
 And fires of ether separate and pure
 Likewise to congregate apart.

                              For, lo,
 First came together the earthy particles
 (As being heavy and intertangled) there
 In the mid-region, and all began to take
 The lowest abodes; and ever the more they got
 One with another intertangled, the more
 They pressed from out their mass those particles
 Which were to form the sea, the stars, the sun,
 And moon, and ramparts of the mighty world--
 For these consist of seeds more smooth and round
 And of much smaller elements than earth.
 And thus it was that ether, fraught with fire,
 First broke away from out the earthen parts,
 Athrough the innumerable pores of earth,
 And raised itself aloft, and with itself
 Bore lightly off the many starry fires;
 And not far otherwise we often see

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 And the still lakes and the perennial streams
 Exhale a mist, and even as earth herself
 Is seen at times to smoke, when first at dawn
 The light of the sun, the many-rayed, begins
 To redden into gold, over the grass
 Begemmed with dew. When all of these are brought
 Together overhead, the clouds on high
 With now concreted body weave a cover
 Beneath the heavens. And thuswise ether too,
 Light and diffusive, with concreted body
 On all sides spread, on all sides bent itself
 Into a dome, and, far and wide diffused
 On unto every region on all sides,
 Thus hedged all else within its greedy clasp.
 Hard upon ether came the origins
 Of sun and moon, whose globes revolve in air
 Midway between the earth and mightiest ether,--
 For neither took them, since they weighed too little
 To sink and settle, but too much to glide
 Along the upmost shores; and yet they are
 In such a wise midway between the twain
 As ever to whirl their living bodies round,
 And ever to dure as parts of the wide Whole;
 In the same fashion as certain members may
 In us remain at rest, whilst others move.
 When, then, these substances had been withdrawn,
 Amain the earth, where now extend the vast
 Cerulean zones of all the level seas,
 Caved in, and down along the hollows poured
 The whirlpools of her brine; and day by day
 The more the tides of ether and rays of sun
 On every side constrained into one mass
 The earth by lashing it again, again,
 Upon its outer edges (so that then,
 Being thus beat upon, 'twas all condensed
 About its proper centre), ever the more
 The salty sweat, from out its body squeezed,
 Augmented ocean and the fields of foam
 By seeping through its frame, and all the more
 Those many particles of heat and air
 Escaping, began to fly aloft, and form,
 By condensation there afar from earth,
 The high refulgent circuits of the heavens.
 The plains began to sink, and windy slopes
 Of the high mountains to increase; for rocks
 Could not subside, nor all the parts of ground
 Settle alike to one same level there.

 Thus, then, the massy weight of earth stood firm
 With now concreted body, when (as 'twere)
 All of the slime of the world, heavy and gross,
 Had run together and settled at the bottom,
 Like lees or bilge. Then ocean, then the air,
 Then ether herself, the fraught-with-fire, were all
 Left with their liquid bodies pure and free,
 And each more lighter than the next below;
 And ether, most light and liquid of the three,
 Floats on above the long aerial winds,
 Nor with the brawling of the winds of air
 Mingles its liquid body. It doth leave
 All there--those under-realms below her heights--
 There to be overset in whirlwinds wild,--
 Doth leave all there to brawl in wayward gusts,
 Whilst, gliding with a fixed impulse still,
 Itself it bears its fires along. For, lo,
 That ether can flow thus steadily on, on,
 With one unaltered urge, the Pontus proves--
 That sea which floweth forth with fixed tides,
 Keeping one onward tenor as it glides.

 And that the earth may there abide at rest
 In the mid-region of the world, it needs
 Must vanish bit by bit in weight and lessen,
 And have another substance underneath,
 Conjoined to it from its earliest age
 In linked unison with the vasty world's
 Realms of the air in which it roots and lives.
 On this account, the earth is not a load,
 Nor presses down on winds of air beneath;
 Even as unto a man his members be
 Without all weight--the head is not a load
 Unto the neck; nor do we feel the whole
 Weight of the body to centre in the feet.
 But whatso weights come on us from without,
 Weights laid upon us, these harass and chafe,
 Though often far lighter. For to such degree
 It matters always what the innate powers
 Of any given thing may be. The earth
 Was, then, no alien substance fetched amain,
 And from no alien firmament cast down
 On alien air; but was conceived, like air,
 In the first origin of this the world,
 As a fixed portion of the same, as now
 Our members are seen to be a part of us.

 Besides, the earth, when of a sudden shook
 By the big thunder, doth with her motion shake
 All that's above her--which she ne'er could do
 By any means, were earth not bounden fast
 Unto the great world's realms of air and sky:
 For they cohere together with common roots,
 Conjoined both, even from their earliest age,
 In linked unison. Aye, seest thou not
 That this most subtle energy of soul
 Supports our body, though so heavy a weight,--
 Because, indeed, 'tis with it so conjoined
 In linked unison? What power, in sum,
 Can raise with agile leap our body aloft,
 Save energy of mind which steers the limbs?
 Now seest thou not how powerful may be
 A subtle nature, when conjoined it is
 With heavy body, as air is with the earth
 Conjoined, and energy of mind with us?

 Now let us sing what makes the stars to move.
 In first place, if the mighty sphere of heaven
 Revolveth round, then needs we must aver
 That on the upper and the under pole
 Presses a certain air, and from without
 Confines them and encloseth at each end;
 And that, moreover, another air above
 Streams on athwart the top of the sphere and tends
 In same direction as are rolled along
 The glittering stars of the eternal world;
 Or that another still streams on below
 To whirl the sphere from under up and on
 In opposite direction--as we see
 The rivers turn the wheels and water-scoops.
 It may be also that the heavens do all
 Remain at rest, whilst yet are borne along
 The lucid constellations; either because
 Swift tides of ether are by sky enclosed,
 And whirl around, seeking a passage out,
 And everywhere make roll the starry fires
 Through the Summanian regions of the sky;
 Or else because some air, streaming along
 From an eternal quarter off beyond,
 Whileth the driven fires, or, then, because
 The fires themselves have power to creep along,
 Going wherever their food invites and calls,
 And feeding their flaming bodies everywhere
 Throughout the sky. Yet which of these is cause
 In this our world 'tis hard to say for sure;
 But what can be throughout the universe,
 In divers worlds on divers plan create,
 This only do I show, and follow on
 To assign unto the motions of the stars
 Even several causes which 'tis possible
 Exist throughout the universal All;
 Of which yet one must be the cause even here
 Which maketh motion for our constellations.
 Yet to decide which one of them it be
 Is not the least the business of a man
 Advancing step by cautious step, as I.

 Nor can the sun's wheel larger be by much
 Nor its own blaze much less than either seems
 Unto our senses. For from whatso spaces
 Fires have the power on us to cast their beams
 And blow their scorching exhalations forth
 Against our members, those same distances
 Take nothing by those intervals away
 From bulk of flames; and to the sight the fire
 Is nothing shrunken. Therefore, since the heat
 And the outpoured light of skiey sun
 Arrive our senses and caress our limbs,
 Form too and bigness of the sun must look
 Even here from earth just as they really be,
 So that thou canst scarce nothing take or add.
 And whether the journeying moon illuminate
 The regions round with bastard beams, or throw
 From off her proper body her own light,--
 Whichever it be, she journeys with a form
 Naught larger than the form doth seem to be
 Which we with eyes of ours perceive. For all
 The far removed objects of our gaze
 Seem through much air confused in their look
 Ere minished in their bigness. Wherefore, moon,
 Since she presents bright look and clear-cut form,
 May there on high by us on earth be seen
 Just as she is with extreme bounds defined,
 And just of the size. And lastly, whatso fires
 Of ether thou from earth beholdest, these
 Thou mayst consider as possibly of size
 The least bit less, or larger by a hair
 Than they appear--since whatso fires we view
 Here in the lands of earth are seen to change
 From time to time their size to less or more
 Only the least, when more or less away,
 So long as still they bicker clear, and still
 Their glow's perceived.

                      Nor need there be for men
 Astonishment that yonder sun so small
 Can yet send forth so great a light as fills
 Oceans and all the lands and sky aflood,
 And with its fiery exhalations steeps
 The world at large. For it may be, indeed,
 That one vast-flowing well-spring of the whole
 Wide world from here hath opened and out-gushed,
 And shot its light abroad; because thuswise
 The elements of fiery exhalations
 From all the world around together come,
 And thuswise flow into a bulk so big
 That from one single fountain-head may stream
 This heat and light. And seest thou not, indeed,
 How widely one small water-spring may wet
 The meadow-lands at times and flood the fields?
 'Tis even possible, besides, that heat
 From forth the sun's own fire, albeit that fire
 Be not a great, may permeate the air
 With the fierce hot--if but, perchance, the air
 Be of condition and so tempered then
 As to be kindled, even when beat upon
 Only by little particles of heat--
 Just as we sometimes see the standing grain
 Or stubble straw in conflagration all
 From one lone spark. And possibly the sun,
 Agleam on high with rosy lampion,
 Possesses about him with invisible heats
 A plenteous fire, by no effulgence marked,
 So that he maketh, he, the Fraught-with-fire,
 Increase to such degree the force of rays.

 Nor is there one sure cause revealed to men
 How the sun journeys from his summer haunts
 On to the mid-most winter turning-points
 In Capricorn, the thence reverting veers
 Back to solstitial goals of Cancer; nor
 How 'tis the moon is seen each month to cross
 That very distance which in traversing
 The sun consumes the measure of a year.
 I say, no one clear reason hath been given
 For these affairs. Yet chief in likelihood
 Seemeth the doctrine which the holy thought
 Of great Democritus lays down: that ever
 The nearer the constellations be to earth
 The less can they by whirling of the sky
 Be borne along, because those skiey powers
 Of speed aloft do vanish and decrease
 In under-regions, and the sun is thus
 Left by degrees behind amongst those signs
 That follow after, since the sun he lies
 Far down below the starry signs that blaze;
 And the moon lags even tardier than the sun:
 In just so far as is her course removed
 From upper heaven and nigh unto the lands,
 In just so far she fails to keep the pace
 With starry signs above; for just so far
 As feebler is the whirl that bears her on,
 (Being, indeed, still lower than the sun),
 In just so far do all the starry signs,
 Circling around, o'ertake her and o'erpass.
 Therefore it happens that the moon appears
 More swiftly to return to any sign
 Along the Zodiac, than doth the sun,
 Because those signs do visit her again
 More swiftly than they visit the great sun.
 It can be also that two streams of air
 Alternately at fixed periods
 Blow out from transverse regions of the world,
 Of which the one may thrust the sun away
 From summer-signs to mid-most winter goals
 And rigors of the cold, and the other then
 May cast him back from icy shades of chill
 Even to the heat-fraught regions and the signs
 That blaze along the Zodiac. So, too,
 We must suppose the moon and all the stars,
 Which through the mighty and sidereal years
 Roll round in mighty orbits, may be sped
 By streams of air from regions alternate.
 Seest thou not also how the clouds be sped
 By contrary winds to regions contrary,
 The lower clouds diversely from the upper?
 Then, why may yonder stars in ether there
 Along their mighty orbits not be borne
 By currents opposite the one to other?

 But night o'erwhelms the lands with vasty murk
 Either when sun, after his diurnal course,
 Hath walked the ultimate regions of the sky
 And wearily hath panted forth his fires,
 Shivered by their long journeying and wasted
 By traversing the multitudinous air,
 Or else because the self-same force that drave
 His orb along above the lands compels
 Him then to turn his course beneath the lands.
 Matuta also at a fixed hour
 Spreadeth the roseate morning out along
 The coasts of heaven and deploys the light,
 Either because the self-same sun, returning
 Under the lands, aspires to seize the sky,
 Striving to set it blazing with his rays
 Ere he himself appear, or else because
 Fires then will congregate and many seeds
 Of heat are wont, even at a fixed time,
 To stream together--gendering evermore
 New suns and light. Just so the story goes
 That from the Idaean mountain-tops are seen
 Dispersed fires upon the break of day
 Which thence combine, as 'twere, into one ball
 And form an orb. Nor yet in these affairs
 Is aught for wonder that these seeds of fire
 Can thus together stream at time so fixed
 And shape anew the splendour of the sun.
 For many facts we see which come to pass
 At fixed time in all things: burgeon shrubs
 At fixed time, and at a fixed time
 They cast their flowers; and Eld commands the teeth,
 At time as surely fixed, to drop away,
 And Youth commands the growing boy to bloom
 With the soft down and let from both his cheeks
 The soft beard fall. And lastly, thunder-bolts,
 Snow, rains, clouds, winds, at seasons of the year
 Nowise unfixed, all do come to pass.
 For where, even from their old primordial start
 Causes have ever worked in such a way,
 And where, even from the world's first origin,
 Thuswise have things befallen, so even now
 After a fixed order they come round
 In sequence also.

                   Likewise, days may wax
 Whilst the nights wane, and daylight minished be
 Whilst nights do take their augmentations,
 Either because the self-same sun, coursing
 Under the lands and over in two arcs,
 A longer and a briefer, doth dispart
 The coasts of ether and divides in twain
 His orbit all unequally, and adds,
 As round he's borne, unto the one half there
 As much as from the other half he's ta'en,
 Until he then arrives that sign of heaven
 Where the year's node renders the shades of night
 Equal unto the periods of light.
 For when the sun is midway on his course
 Between the blasts of northwind and of south,
 Heaven keeps his two goals parted equally,
 By virtue of the fixed position old
 Of the whole starry Zodiac, through which
 That sun, in winding onward, takes a year,
 Illumining the sky and all the lands
 With oblique light--as men declare to us
 Who by their diagrams have charted well
 Those regions of the sky which be adorned
 With the arranged signs of Zodiac.
 Or else, because in certain parts the air
 Under the lands is denser, the tremulous
 Bright beams of fire do waver tardily,
 Nor easily can penetrate that air
 Nor yet emerge unto their rising-place:
 For this it is that nights in winter time
 Do linger long, ere comes the many-rayed
 Round Badge of the day. Or else because, as said,
 In alternating seasons of the year
 Fires, now more quick, and now more slow, are wont
 To stream together,--the fires which make the sun
 To rise in some one spot--therefore it is
 That those men seem to speak the truth [who hold
 A new sun is with each new daybreak born].

 The moon she possibly doth shine because
 Strook by the rays of sun, and day by day
 May turn unto our gaze her light, the more
 She doth recede from orb of sun, until,
 Facing him opposite across the world,
 She hath with full effulgence gleamed abroad,
 And, at her rising as she soars above,
 Hath there observed his setting; thence likewise
 She needs must hide, as 'twere, her light behind
 By slow degrees, the nearer now she glides,
 Along the circle of the Zodiac,
 From her far place toward fires of yonder sun,--
 As those men hold who feign the moon to be
 Just like a ball and to pursue a course
 Betwixt the sun and earth. There is, again,
 Some reason to suppose that moon may roll
 With light her very own, and thus display
 The varied shapes of her resplendence there.
 For near her is, percase, another body,
 Invisible, because devoid of light,
 Borne on and gliding all along with her,
 Which in three modes may block and blot her disk.
 Again, she may revolve upon herself,
 Like to a ball's sphere--if perchance that be--
 One half of her dyed o'er with glowing light,
 And by the revolution of that sphere
 She may beget for us her varying shapes,
 Until she turns that fiery part of her
 Full to the sight and open eyes of men;
 Thence by slow stages round and back she whirls,
 Withdrawing thus the luminiferous part
 Of her sphered mass and ball, as, verily,
 The Babylonian doctrine of Chaldees,
 Refuting the art of Greek astrologers,
 Labours, in opposition, to prove sure--
 As if, forsooth, the thing for which each fights,
 Might not alike be true,--or aught there were
 Wherefore thou mightest risk embracing one
 More than the other notion. Then, again,
 Why a new moon might not forevermore
 Created be with fixed successions there
 Of shapes and with configurations fixed,
 And why each day that bright created moon
 Might not miscarry and another be,
 In its stead and place, engendered anew,
 'Tis hard to show by reason, or by words
 To prove absurd--since, lo, so many things
 Can be create with fixed successions:
 Spring-time and Venus come, and Venus' boy,
 The winged harbinger, steps on before,
 And hard on Zephyr's foot-prints Mother Flora,
 Sprinkling the ways before them, filleth all
 With colours and with odours excellent;
 Whereafter follows arid Heat, and he
 Companioned is by Ceres, dusty one,
 And by the Etesian Breezes of the north;
 Then cometh Autumn on, and with him steps
 Lord Bacchus, and then other Seasons too
 And other Winds do follow--the high roar
 Of great Volturnus, and the Southwind strong
 With thunder-bolts. At last earth's Shortest-Day
 Bears on to men the snows and brings again
 The numbing cold. And Winter follows her,
 His teeth with chills a-chatter. Therefore, 'tis
 The less a marvel, if at fixed time
 A moon is thus begotten and again
 At fixed time destroyed, since things so many
 Can come to being thus at fixed time.
 Likewise, the sun's eclipses and the moon's
 Far occultations rightly thou mayst deem

 As due to several causes. For, indeed,
 Why should the moon be able to shut out
 Earth from the light of sun, and on the side
 To earthward thrust her high head under sun,
 Opposing dark orb to his glowing beams--
 And yet, at same time, one suppose the effect
 Could not result from some one other body
 Which glides devoid of light forevermore?
 Again, why could not sun, in weakened state,
 At fixed time for-lose his fires, and then,
 When he has passed on along the air
 Beyond the regions, hostile to his flames,
 That quench and kill his fires, why could not he
 Renew his light? And why should earth in turn
 Have power to rob the moon of light, and there,
 Herself on high, keep the sun hid beneath,
 Whilst the moon glideth in her monthly course
 Athrough the rigid shadows of the cone?--
 And yet, at same time, some one other body
 Not have the power to under-pass the moon,
 Or glide along above the orb of sun,
 Breaking his rays and outspread light asunder?
 And still, if moon herself refulgent be
 With her own sheen, why could she not at times
 In some one quarter of the mighty world
 Grow weak and weary, whilst she passeth through
 Regions unfriendly to the beams her own?

ORIGINS OF VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE

 And now to what remains!--Since I've resolved
 By what arrangements all things come to pass
 Through the blue regions of the mighty world,--
 How we can know what energy and cause
 Started the various courses of the sun
 And the moon's goings, and by what far means
 They can succumb, the while with thwarted light,
 And veil with shade the unsuspecting lands,
 When, as it were, they blink, and then again
 With open eye survey all regions wide,
 Resplendent with white radiance--I do now
 Return unto the world's primeval age
 And tell what first the soft young fields of earth
 With earliest parturition had decreed
 To raise in air unto the shores of light
 And to entrust unto the wayward winds.
 In the beginning, earth gave forth, around
 The hills and over all the length of plains,
 The race of grasses and the shining green;
 The flowery meadows sparkled all aglow
 With greening colour, and thereafter, lo,
 Unto the divers kinds of trees was given
 An emulous impulse mightily to shoot,
 With a free rein, aloft into the air.
 As feathers and hairs and bristles are begot
 The first on members of the four-foot breeds
 And on the bodies of the strong-y-winged,
 Thus then the new Earth first of all put forth
 Grasses and shrubs, and afterward begat
 The mortal generations, there upsprung--
 Innumerable in modes innumerable--
 After diverging fashions. For from sky
 These breathing-creatures never can have dropped,
 Nor the land-dwellers ever have come up
 Out of sea-pools of salt. How true remains,
 How merited is that adopted name
 Of earth--"The Mother!"--since from out the earth
 Are all begotten. And even now arise
 From out the loams how many living things--
 Concreted by the rains and heat of the sun.
 Wherefore 'tis less a marvel, if they sprang
 In Long Ago more many, and more big,
 Matured of those days in the fresh young years
 Of earth and ether. First of all, the race
 Of the winged ones and parti-coloured birds,
 Hatched out in spring-time, left their eggs behind;
 As now-a-days in summer tree-crickets
 Do leave their shiny husks of own accord,
 Seeking their food and living. Then it was
 This earth of thine first gave unto the day
 The mortal generations; for prevailed
 Among the fields abounding hot and wet.
 And hence, where any fitting spot was given,
 There 'gan to grow womb-cavities, by roots
 Affixed to earth. And when in ripened time
 The age of the young within (that sought the air
 And fled earth's damps) had burst these wombs, O then
 Would Nature thither turn the pores of earth
 And make her spurt from open veins a juice
 Like unto milk; even as a woman now
 Is filled, at child-bearing, with the sweet milk,
 Because all that swift stream of aliment
 Is thither turned unto the mother-breasts.
 There earth would furnish to the children food;
 Warmth was their swaddling cloth, the grass their bed
 Abounding in soft down. Earth's newness then
 Would rouse no dour spells of the bitter cold,
 Nor extreme heats nor winds of mighty powers--
 For all things grow and gather strength through time
 In like proportions; and then earth was young.

 Wherefore, again, again, how merited
 Is that adopted name of Earth--The Mother!--
 Since she herself begat the human race,
 And at one well-nigh fixed time brought forth
 Each breast that ranges raving round about
 Upon the mighty mountains and all birds
 Aerial with many a varied shape.
 But, lo, because her bearing years must end,
 She ceased, like to a woman worn by eld.
 For lapsing aeons change the nature of
 The whole wide world, and all things needs must take
 One status after other, nor aught persists
 Forever like itself. All things depart;
 Nature she changeth all, compelleth all
 To transformation. Lo, this moulders down,
 A-slack with weary eld, and that, again,
 Prospers in glory, issuing from contempt.
 In suchwise, then, the lapsing aeons change
 The nature of the whole wide world, and earth
 Taketh one status after other. And what
 She bore of old, she now can bear no longer,
 And what she never bore, she can to-day.

 In those days also the telluric world
 Strove to beget the monsters that upsprung
 With their astounding visages and limbs--
 The Man-woman--a thing betwixt the twain,
 Yet neither, and from either sex remote--
 Some gruesome Boggles orphaned of the feet,
 Some widowed of the hands, dumb Horrors too
 Without a mouth, or blind Ones of no eye,
 Or Bulks all shackled by their legs and arms
 Cleaving unto the body fore and aft,
 Thuswise, that never could they do or go,
 Nor shun disaster, nor take the good they would.
 And other prodigies and monsters earth
 Was then begetting of this sort--in vain,
 Since Nature banned with horror their increase,
 And powerless were they to reach unto
 The coveted flower of fair maturity,
 Or to find aliment, or to intertwine
 In works of Venus. For we see there must
 Concur in life conditions manifold,
 If life is ever by begetting life
 To forge the generations one by one:
 First, foods must be; and, next, a path whereby
 The seeds of impregnation in the frame
 May ooze, released from the members all;
 Last, the possession of those instruments
 Whereby the male with female can unite,
 The one with other in mutual ravishments.

 And in the ages after monsters died,
 Perforce there perished many a stock, unable
 By propagation to forge a progeny.
 For whatsoever creatures thou beholdest
 Breathing the breath of life, the same have been
 Even from their earliest age preserved alive
 By cunning, or by valour, or at least
 By speed of foot or wing. And many a stock
 Remaineth yet, because of use to man,
 And so committed to man's guardianship.
 Valour hath saved alive fierce lion-breeds
 And many another terrorizing race,
 Cunning the foxes, flight the antlered stags.
 Light-sleeping dogs with faithful heart in breast,
 However, and every kind begot from seed
 Of beasts of draft, as, too, the woolly flocks
 And horned cattle, all, my Memmius,
 Have been committed to guardianship of men.
 For anxiously they fled the savage beasts,
 And peace they sought and their abundant foods,
 Obtained with never labours of their own,
 Which we secure to them as fit rewards
 For their good service. But those beasts to whom
 Nature has granted naught of these same things--
 Beasts quite unfit by own free will to thrive
 And vain for any service unto us
 In thanks for which we should permit their kind
 To feed and be in our protection safe--
 Those, of a truth, were wont to be exposed,
 Enshackled in the gruesome bonds of doom,
 As prey and booty for the rest, until
 Nature reduced that stock to utter death.

 But Centaurs ne'er have been, nor can there be
 Creatures of twofold stock and double frame,
 Compact of members alien in kind,
 Yet formed with equal function, equal force
 In every bodily part--a fact thou mayst,
 However dull thy wits, well learn from this:
 The horse, when his three years have rolled away,
 Flowers in his prime of vigour; but the boy
 Not so, for oft even then he gropes in sleep
 After the milky nipples of the breasts,
 An infant still. And later, when at last
 The lusty powers of horses and stout limbs,
 Now weak through lapsing life, do fail with age,
 Lo, only then doth youth with flowering years
 Begin for boys, and clothe their ruddy cheeks
 With the soft down. So never deem, percase,
 That from a man and from the seed of horse,
 The beast of draft, can Centaurs be composed
 Or e'er exist alive, nor Scyllas be--
 The half-fish bodies girdled with mad dogs--
 Nor others of this sort, in whom we mark
 Members discordant each with each; for ne'er
 At one same time they reach their flower of age
 Or gain and lose full vigour of their frame,
 And never burn with one same lust of love,
 And never in their habits they agree,
 Nor find the same foods equally delightsome--
 Sooth, as one oft may see the bearded goats
 Batten upon the hemlock which to man
 Is violent poison. Once again, since flame
 Is wont to scorch and burn the tawny bulks
 Of the great lions as much as other kinds
 Of flesh and blood existing in the lands,
 How could it be that she, Chimaera lone,
 With triple body--fore, a lion she;
 And aft, a dragon; and betwixt, a goat--
 Might at the mouth from out the body belch
 Infuriate flame? Wherefore, the man who feigns
 Such beings could have been engendered
 When earth was new and the young sky was fresh
 (Basing his empty argument on new)
 May babble with like reason many whims
 Into our ears: he'll say, perhaps, that then
 Rivers of gold through every landscape flowed,
 That trees were wont with precious stones to flower,
 Or that in those far aeons man was born
 With such gigantic length and lift of limbs
 As to be able, based upon his feet,
 Deep oceans to bestride or with his hands
 To whirl the firmament around his head.
 For though in earth were many seeds of things
 In the old time when this telluric world
 First poured the breeds of animals abroad,
 Still that is nothing of a sign that then
 Such hybrid creatures could have been begot
 And limbs of all beasts heterogeneous
 Have been together knit; because, indeed,
 The divers kinds of grasses and the grains
 And the delightsome trees--which even now
 Spring up abounding from within the earth--
 Can still ne'er be begotten with their stems
 Begrafted into one; but each sole thing
 Proceeds according to its proper wont
 And all conserve their own distinctions based
 In nature's fixed decree.

ORIGINS AND SAVAGE PERIOD OF MANKIND

                           But mortal man
 Was then far hardier in the old champaign,
 As well he should be, since a hardier earth
 Had him begotten; builded too was he
 Of bigger and more solid bones within,
 And knit with stalwart sinews through the flesh,
 Nor easily seized by either heat or cold,
 Or alien food or any ail or irk.
 And whilst so many lustrums of the sun
 Rolled on across the sky, men led a life
 After the roving habit of wild beasts.
 Not then were sturdy guiders of curved ploughs,
 And none knew then to work the fields with iron,
 Or plant young shoots in holes of delved loam,
 Or lop with hooked knives from off high trees
 The boughs of yester-year. What sun and rains
 To them had given, what earth of own accord
 Created then, was boon enough to glad
 Their simple hearts. Mid acorn-laden oaks
 Would they refresh their bodies for the nonce;
 And the wild berries of the arbute-tree,
 Which now thou seest to ripen purple-red
 In winter time, the old telluric soil
 Would bear then more abundant and more big.
 And many coarse foods, too, in long ago
 The blooming freshness of the rank young world
 Produced, enough for those poor wretches there.
 And rivers and springs would summon them of old
 To slake the thirst, as now from the great hills
 The water's down-rush calls aloud and far
 The thirsty generations of the wild.
 So, too, they sought the grottos of the Nymphs--
 The woodland haunts discovered as they ranged--
 From forth of which they knew that gliding rills
 With gush and splash abounding laved the rocks,
 The dripping rocks, and trickled from above
 Over the verdant moss; and here and there
 Welled up and burst across the open flats.
 As yet they knew not to enkindle fire
 Against the cold, nor hairy pelts to use
 And clothe their bodies with the spoils of beasts;
 But huddled in groves, and mountain-caves, and woods,
 And 'mongst the thickets hid their squalid backs,
 When driven to flee the lashings of the winds
 And the big rains. Nor could they then regard
 The general good, nor did they know to use
 In common any customs, any laws:
 Whatever of booty fortune unto each
 Had proffered, each alone would bear away,
 By instinct trained for self to thrive and live.
 And Venus in the forests then would link
 The lovers' bodies; for the woman yielded
 Either from mutual flame, or from the man's
 Impetuous fury and insatiate lust,
 Or from a bribe--as acorn-nuts, choice pears,
 Or the wild berries of the arbute-tree.
 And trusting wondrous strength of hands and legs,
 They'd chase the forest-wanderers, the beasts;
 And many they'd conquer, but some few they fled,
 A-skulk into their hiding-places...

 *****

 With the flung stones and with the ponderous heft
 Of gnarled branch. And by the time of night
 O'ertaken, they would throw, like bristly boars,
 Their wildman's limbs naked upon the earth,
 Rolling themselves in leaves and fronded boughs.
 Nor would they call with lamentations loud
 Around the fields for daylight and the sun,
 Quaking and wand'ring in shadows of the night;
 But, silent and buried in a sleep, they'd wait
 Until the sun with rosy flambeau brought
 The glory to the sky. From childhood wont
 Ever to see the dark and day begot
 In times alternate, never might they be
 Wildered by wild misgiving, lest a night
 Eternal should possess the lands, with light
 Of sun withdrawn forever. But their care
 Was rather that the clans of savage beasts
 Would often make their sleep-time horrible
 For those poor wretches; and, from home y-driven,
 They'd flee their rocky shelters at approach
 Of boar, the spumy-lipped, or lion strong,
 And in the midnight yield with terror up
 To those fierce guests their beds of out-spread leaves.

 And yet in those days not much more than now
 Would generations of mortality
 Leave the sweet light of fading life behind.
 Indeed, in those days here and there a man,
 More oftener snatched upon, and gulped by fangs,
 Afforded the beasts a food that roared alive,
 Echoing through groves and hills and forest-trees,
 Even as he viewed his living flesh entombed
 Within a living grave; whilst those whom flight
 Had saved, with bone and body bitten, shrieked,
 Pressing their quivering palms to loathsome sores,
 With horrible voices for eternal death--
 Until, forlorn of help, and witless what
 Might medicine their wounds, the writhing pangs
 Took them from life. But not in those far times
 Would one lone day give over unto doom
 A soldiery in thousands marching on
 Beneath the battle-banners, nor would then
 The ramping breakers of the main seas dash
 Whole argosies and crews upon the rocks.
 But ocean uprisen would often rave in vain,
 Without all end or outcome, and give up
 Its empty menacings as lightly too;
 Nor soft seductions of a serene sea
 Could lure by laughing billows any man
 Out to disaster: for the science bold
 Of ship-sailing lay dark in those far times.
 Again, 'twas then that lack of food gave o'er
 Men's fainting limbs to dissolution: now
 'Tis plenty overwhelms. Unwary, they
 Oft for themselves themselves would then outpour
 The poison; now, with nicer art, themselves
 They give the drafts to others.

BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION

                                Afterwards,
 When huts they had procured and pelts and fire,
 And when the woman, joined unto the man,
 Withdrew with him into one dwelling place,

 *****

 Were known; and when they saw an offspring born
 From out themselves, then first the human race
 Began to soften. For 'twas now that fire
 Rendered their shivering frames less staunch to bear,
 Under the canopy of the sky, the cold;
 And Love reduced their shaggy hardiness;
 And children, with the prattle and the kiss,
 Soon broke the parents' haughty temper down.
 Then, too, did neighbours 'gin to league as friends,
 Eager to wrong no more or suffer wrong,
 And urged for children and the womankind
 Mercy, of fathers, whilst with cries and gestures
 They stammered hints how meet it was that all
 Should have compassion on the weak. And still,
 Though concord not in every wise could then
 Begotten be, a good, a goodly part
 Kept faith inviolate--or else mankind
 Long since had been unutterably cut off,
 And propagation never could have brought
 The species down the ages.

                        Lest, perchance,
 Concerning these affairs thou ponderest
 In silent meditation, let me say
 'Twas lightning brought primevally to earth
 The fire for mortals, and from thence hath spread
 O'er all the lands the flames of heat. For thus
 Even now we see so many objects, touched
 By the celestial flames, to flash aglow,
 When thunderbolt has dowered them with heat.
 Yet also when a many-branched tree,
 Beaten by winds, writhes swaying to and fro,
 Pressing 'gainst branches of a neighbour tree,
 There by the power of mighty rub and rub
 Is fire engendered; and at times out-flares
 The scorching heat of flame, when boughs do chafe
 Against the trunks. And of these causes, either
 May well have given to mortal men the fire.
 Next, food to cook and soften in the flame
 The sun instructed, since so oft they saw
 How objects mellowed, when subdued by warmth
 And by the raining blows of fiery beams,
 Through all the fields.

                      And more and more each day
 Would men more strong in sense, more wise in heart,
 Teach them to change their earlier mode and life
 By fire and new devices. Kings began
 Cities to found and citadels to set,
 As strongholds and asylums for themselves,
 And flocks and fields to portion for each man
 After the beauty, strength, and sense of each--
 For beauty then imported much, and strength
 Had its own rights supreme. Thereafter, wealth
 Discovered was, and gold was brought to light,
 Which soon of honour stripped both strong and fair;
 For men, however beautiful in form
 Or valorous, will follow in the main
 The rich man's party. Yet were man to steer
 His life by sounder reasoning, he'd own
 Abounding riches, if with mind content
 He lived by thrift; for never, as I guess,
 Is there a lack of little in the world.
 But men wished glory for themselves and power
 Even that their fortunes on foundations firm
 Might rest forever, and that they themselves,
 The opulent, might pass a quiet life--
 In vain, in vain; since, in the strife to climb
 On to the heights of honour, men do make
 Their pathway terrible; and even when once
 They reach them, envy like the thunderbolt
 At times will smite, O hurling headlong down
 To murkiest Tartarus, in scorn; for, lo,
 All summits, all regions loftier than the rest,
 Smoke, blasted as by envy's thunderbolts;
 So better far in quiet to obey,
 Than to desire chief mastery of affairs
 And ownership of empires. Be it so;
 And let the weary sweat their life-blood out
 All to no end, battling in hate along
 The narrow path of man's ambition;
 Since all their wisdom is from others' lips,
 And all they seek is known from what they've heard
 And less from what they've thought. Nor is this folly
 Greater to-day, nor greater soon to be,
 Than' twas of old.

                 And therefore kings were slain,
 And pristine majesty of golden thrones
 And haughty sceptres lay o'erturned in dust;
 And crowns, so splendid on the sovereign heads,
 Soon bloody under the proletarian feet,
 Groaned for their glories gone--for erst o'er-much
 Dreaded, thereafter with more greedy zest
 Trampled beneath the rabble heel. Thus things
 Down to the vilest lees of brawling mobs
 Succumbed, whilst each man sought unto himself
 Dominion and supremacy. So next
 Some wiser heads instructed men to found
 The magisterial office, and did frame
 Codes that they might consent to follow laws.
 For humankind, o'er wearied with a life
 Fostered by force, was ailing from its feuds;
 And so the sooner of its own free will
 Yielded to laws and strictest codes. For since
 Each hand made ready in its wrath to take
 A vengeance fiercer than by man's fair laws
 Is now conceded, men on this account
 Loathed the old life fostered by force. 'Tis thence
 That fear of punishments defiles each prize
 Of wicked days; for force and fraud ensnare
 Each man around, and in the main recoil
 On him from whence they sprung. Not easy 'tis
 For one who violates by ugly deeds
 The bonds of common peace to pass a life
 Composed and tranquil. For albeit he 'scape
 The race of gods and men, he yet must dread
 'Twill not be hid forever--since, indeed,
 So many, oft babbling on amid their dreams
 Or raving in sickness, have betrayed themselves
 (As stories tell) and published at last
 Old secrets and the sins.

                          But nature 'twas
 Urged men to utter various sounds of tongue
 And need and use did mould the names of things,
 About in same wise as the lack-speech years
 Compel young children unto gesturings,
 Making them point with finger here and there
 At what's before them. For each creature feels
 By instinct to what use to put his powers.
 Ere yet the bull-calf's scarce begotten horns
 Project above his brows, with them he 'gins
 Enraged to butt and savagely to thrust.
 But whelps of panthers and the lion's cubs
 With claws and paws and bites are at the fray
 Already, when their teeth and claws be scarce
 As yet engendered. So again, we see
 All breeds of winged creatures trust to wings
 And from their fledgling pinions seek to get
 A fluttering assistance. Thus, to think
 That in those days some man apportioned round
 To things their names, and that from him men learned
 Their first nomenclature, is foolery.
 For why could he mark everything by words
 And utter the various sounds of tongue, what time
 The rest may be supposed powerless
 To do the same? And, if the rest had not
 Already one with other used words,
 Whence was implanted in the teacher, then,
 Fore-knowledge of their use, and whence was given
 To him alone primordial faculty
 To know and see in mind what 'twas he willed?
 Besides, one only man could scarce subdue
 An overmastered multitude to choose
 To get by heart his names of things. A task
 Not easy 'tis in any wise to teach
 And to persuade the deaf concerning what
 'Tis needful for to do. For ne'er would they
 Allow, nor ne'er in anywise endure
 Perpetual vain dingdong in their ears
 Of spoken sounds unheard before. And what,
 At last, in this affair so wondrous is,
 That human race (in whom a voice and tongue
 Were now in vigour) should by divers words
 Denote its objects, as each divers sense
 Might prompt?--since even the speechless herds, aye, since
 The very generations of wild beasts
 Are wont dissimilar and divers sounds
 To rouse from in them, when there's fear or pain,
 And when they burst with joys. And this, forsooth,
 'Tis thine to know from plainest facts: when first
 Huge flabby jowls of mad Molossian hounds,
 Baring their hard white teeth, begin to snarl,
 They threaten, with infuriate lips peeled back,
 In sounds far other than with which they bark
 And fill with voices all the regions round.
 And when with fondling tongue they start to lick
 Their puppies, or do toss them round with paws,
 Feigning with gentle bites to gape and snap,
 They fawn with yelps of voice far other then
 Than when, alone within the house, they bay,
 Or whimpering slink with cringing sides from blows.
 Again the neighing of the horse, is that
 Not seen to differ likewise, when the stud
 In buoyant flower of his young years raves,
 Goaded by winged Love, amongst the mares,
 And when with widening nostrils out he snorts
 The call to battle, and when haply he
 Whinnies at times with terror-quaking limbs?
 Lastly, the flying race, the dappled birds,
 Hawks, ospreys, sea-gulls, searching food and life
 Amid the ocean billows in the brine,
 Utter at other times far other cries
 Than when they fight for food, or with their prey
 Struggle and strain. And birds there are which change
 With changing weather their own raucous songs--
 As long-lived generations of the crows
 Or flocks of rooks, when they be said to cry
 For rain and water and to call at times
 For winds and gales. Ergo, if divers moods
 Compel the brutes, though speechless evermore,
 To send forth divers sounds, O truly then
 How much more likely 'twere that mortal men
 In those days could with many a different sound
 Denote each separate thing.

                           And now what cause
 Hath spread divinities of gods abroad
 Through mighty nations, and filled the cities full
 Of the high altars, and led to practices
 Of solemn rites in season--rites which still
 Flourish in midst of great affairs of state
 And midst great centres of man's civic life,
 The rites whence still a poor mortality
 Is grafted that quaking awe which rears aloft
 Still the new temples of gods from land to land
 And drives mankind to visit them in throngs
 On holy days--'tis not so hard to give
 Reason thereof in speech. Because, in sooth,
 Even in those days would the race of man
 Be seeing excelling visages of gods
 With mind awake; and in his sleeps, yet more--
 Bodies of wondrous growth. And, thus, to these
 Would men attribute sense, because they seemed
 To move their limbs and speak pronouncements high,
 Befitting glorious visage and vast powers.
 And men would give them an eternal life,
 Because their visages forevermore
 Were there before them, and their shapes remained,
 And chiefly, however, because men would not think
 Beings augmented with such mighty powers
 Could well by any force o'ermastered be.
 And men would think them in their happiness
 Excelling far, because the fear of death
 Vexed no one of them at all, and since
 At same time in men's sleeps men saw them do
 So many wonders, and yet feel therefrom
 Themselves no weariness. Besides, men marked
 How in a fixed order rolled around
 The systems of the sky, and changed times
 Of annual seasons, nor were able then
 To know thereof the causes. Therefore 'twas
 Men would take refuge in consigning all
 Unto divinities, and in feigning all
 Was guided by their nod. And in the sky
 They set the seats and vaults of gods, because
 Across the sky night and the moon are seen
 To roll along--moon, day, and night, and night's
 Old awesome constellations evermore,
 And the night-wandering fireballs of the sky,
 And flying flames, clouds, and the sun, the rains,
 Snow and the winds, the lightnings, and the hail,
 And the swift rumblings, and the hollow roar
 Of mighty menacings forevermore.

 O humankind unhappy!--when it ascribed
 Unto divinities such awesome deeds,
 And coupled thereto rigours of fierce wrath!
 What groans did men on that sad day beget
 Even for themselves, and O what wounds for us,
 What tears for our children's children! Nor, O man,
 Is thy true piety in this: with head
 Under the veil, still to be seen to turn
 Fronting a stone, and ever to approach
 Unto all altars; nor so prone on earth
 Forward to fall, to spread upturned palms
 Before the shrines of gods, nor yet to dew
 Altars with profuse blood of four-foot beasts,
 Nor vows with vows to link. But rather this:
 To look on all things with a master eye
 And mind at peace. For when we gaze aloft
 Upon the skiey vaults of yon great world
 And ether, fixed high o'er twinkling stars,
 And into our thought there come the journeyings
 Of sun and moon, O then into our breasts,
 O'erburdened already with their other ills,
 Begins forthwith to rear its sudden head
 One more misgiving: lest o'er us, percase,
 It be the gods' immeasurable power
 That rolls, with varied motion, round and round
 The far white constellations. For the lack
 Of aught of reasons tries the puzzled mind:
 Whether was ever a birth-time of the world,
 And whether, likewise, any end shall be
 How far the ramparts of the world can still
 Outstand this strain of ever-roused motion,
 Or whether, divinely with eternal weal
 Endowed, they can through endless tracts of age
 Glide on, defying the o'er-mighty powers
 Of the immeasurable ages. Lo,
 What man is there whose mind with dread of gods
 Cringes not close, whose limbs with terror-spell
 Crouch not together, when the parched earth
 Quakes with the horrible thunderbolt amain,
 And across the mighty sky the rumblings run?
 Do not the peoples and the nations shake,
 And haughty kings do they not hug their limbs,
 Strook through with fear of the divinities,
 Lest for aught foully done or madly said
 The heavy time be now at hand to pay?
 When, too, fierce force of fury-winds at sea
 Sweepeth a navy's admiral down the main
 With his stout legions and his elephants,
 Doth he not seek the peace of gods with vows,
 And beg in prayer, a-tremble, lulled winds
 And friendly gales?--in vain, since, often up-caught
 In fury-cyclones, is he borne along,
 For all his mouthings, to the shoals of doom.
 Ah, so irrevocably some hidden power
 Betramples forevermore affairs of men,
 And visibly grindeth with its heel in mire
 The lictors' glorious rods and axes dire,
 Having them in derision! Again, when earth
 From end to end is rocking under foot,
 And shaken cities ruin down, or threaten
 Upon the verge, what wonder is it then
 That mortal generations abase themselves,
 And unto gods in all affairs of earth
 Assign as last resort almighty powers
 And wondrous energies to govern all?

 Now for the rest: copper and gold and iron
 Discovered were, and with them silver's weight
 And power of lead, when with prodigious heat
 The conflagrations burned the forest trees
 Among the mighty mountains, by a bolt
 Of lightning from the sky, or else because
 Men, warring in the woodlands, on their foes
 Had hurled fire to frighten and dismay,
 Or yet because, by goodness of the soil
 Invited, men desired to clear rich fields
 And turn the countryside to pasture-lands,
 Or slay the wild and thrive upon the spoils.
 (For hunting by pit-fall and by fire arose
 Before the art of hedging the covert round
 With net or stirring it with dogs of chase.)
 Howso the fact, and from what cause soever
 The flamy heat with awful crack and roar
 Had there devoured to their deepest roots
 The forest trees and baked the earth with fire,
 Then from the boiling veins began to ooze
 O rivulets of silver and of gold,
 Of lead and copper too, collecting soon
 Into the hollow places of the ground.
 And when men saw the cooled lumps anon
 To shine with splendour-sheen upon the ground,
 Much taken with that lustrous smooth delight,
 They 'gan to pry them out, and saw how each
 Had got a shape like to its earthy mould.
 Then would it enter their heads how these same lumps,
 If melted by heat, could into any form
 Or figure of things be run, and how, again,
 If hammered out, they could be nicely drawn
 To sharpest points or finest edge, and thus
 Yield to the forgers tools and give them power
 To chop the forest down, to hew the logs,
 To shave the beams and planks, besides to bore
 And punch and drill. And men began such work
 At first as much with tools of silver and gold
 As with the impetuous strength of the stout copper;
 But vainly--since their over-mastered power
 Would soon give way, unable to endure,
 Like copper, such hard labour. In those days
 Copper it was that was the thing of price;
 And gold lay useless, blunted with dull edge.
 Now lies the copper low, and gold hath come
 Unto the loftiest honours. Thus it is
 That rolling ages change the times of things:
 What erst was of a price, becomes at last
 A discard of no honour; whilst another
 Succeeds to glory, issuing from contempt,
 And day by day is sought for more and more,
 And, when 'tis found, doth flower in men's praise,
 Objects of wondrous honour.

                            Now, Memmius,
 How nature of iron discovered was, thou mayst
 Of thine own self divine. Man's ancient arms
 Were hands, and nails and teeth, stones too and boughs--
 Breakage of forest trees--and flame and fire,
 As soon as known. Thereafter force of iron
 And copper discovered was; and copper's use
 Was known ere iron's, since more tractable
 Its nature is and its abundance more.
 With copper men to work the soil began,
 With copper to rouse the hurly waves of war,
 To straw the monstrous wounds, and seize away
 Another's flocks and fields. For unto them,
 Thus armed, all things naked of defence
 Readily yielded. Then by slow degrees
 The sword of iron succeeded, and the shape
 Of brazen sickle into scorn was turned:
 With iron to cleave the soil of earth they 'gan,
 And the contentions of uncertain war
 Were rendered equal.

                    And, lo, man was wont
 Armed to mount upon the ribs of horse
 And guide him with the rein, and play about
 With right hand free, oft times before he tried
 Perils of war in yoked chariot;
 And yoked pairs abreast came earlier
 Than yokes of four, or scythed chariots
 Whereinto clomb the men-at-arms. And next
 The Punic folk did train the elephants--
 Those curst Lucanian oxen, hideous,
 The serpent-handed, with turrets on their bulks--
 To dure the wounds of war and panic-strike
 The mighty troops of Mars. Thus Discord sad
 Begat the one Thing after other, to be
 The terror of the nations under arms,
 And day by day to horrors of old war
 She added an increase.

                     Bulls, too, they tried
 In war's grim business; and essayed to send
 Outrageous boars against the foes. And some
 Sent on before their ranks puissant lions
 With armed trainers and with masters fierce
 To guide and hold in chains--and yet in vain,
 Since fleshed with pell-mell slaughter, fierce they flew,
 And blindly through the squadrons havoc wrought,
 Shaking the frightful crests upon their heads,
 Now here, now there. Nor could the horsemen calm
 Their horses, panic-breasted at the roar,
 And rein them round to front the foe. With spring
 The infuriate she-lions would up-leap
 Now here, now there; and whoso came apace
 Against them, these they'd rend across the face;
 And others unwitting from behind they'd tear
 Down from their mounts, and twining round them, bring
 Tumbling to earth, o'ermastered by the wound,
 And with those powerful fangs and hooked claws
 Fasten upon them. Bulls would toss their friends,
 And trample under foot, and from beneath
 Rip flanks and bellies of horses with their horns,
 And with a threat'ning forehead jam the sod;
 And boars would gore with stout tusks their allies,
 Splashing in fury their own blood on spears
 Splintered in their own bodies, and would fell
 In rout and ruin infantry and horse.
 For there the beasts-of-saddle tried to scape
 The savage thrusts of tusk by shying off,
 Or rearing up with hoofs a-paw in air.
 In vain--since there thou mightest see them sink,
 Their sinews severed, and with heavy fall
 Bestrew the ground. And such of these as men
 Supposed well-trained long ago at home,
 Were in the thick of action seen to foam
 In fury, from the wounds, the shrieks, the flight,
 The panic, and the tumult; nor could men
 Aught of their numbers rally. For each breed
 And various of the wild beasts fled apart
 Hither or thither, as often in wars to-day
 Flee those Lucanian oxen, by the steel
 Grievously mangled, after they have wrought
 Upon their friends so many a dreadful doom.
 (If 'twas, indeed, that thus they did at all:
 But scarcely I'll believe that men could not
 With mind foreknow and see, as sure to come,
 Such foul and general disaster.--This
 We, then, may hold as true in the great All,
 In divers worlds on divers plan create,--
 Somewhere afar more likely than upon
 One certain earth.) But men chose this to do
 Less in the hope of conquering than to give
 Their enemies a goodly cause of woe,
 Even though thereby they perished themselves,
 Since weak in numbers and since wanting arms.

 Now, clothes of roughly inter-plaited strands
 Were earlier than loom-wove coverings;
 The loom-wove later than man's iron is,
 Since iron is needful in the weaving art,
 Nor by no other means can there be wrought
 Such polished tools--the treadles, spindles, shuttles,
 And sounding yarn-beams. And nature forced the men,
 Before the woman kind, to work the wool:
 For all the male kind far excels in skill,
 And cleverer is by much--until at last
 The rugged farmer folk jeered at such tasks,
 And so were eager soon to give them o'er
 To women's hands, and in more hardy toil
 To harden arms and hands.

                     But nature herself,
 Mother of things, was the first seed-sower
 And primal grafter; since the berries and acorns,
 Dropping from off the trees, would there beneath
 Put forth in season swarms of little shoots;
 Hence too men's fondness for ingrafting slips
 Upon the boughs and setting out in holes
 The young shrubs o'er the fields. Then would they try
 Ever new modes of tilling their loved crofts,
 And mark they would how earth improved the taste
 Of the wild fruits by fond and fostering care.
 And day by day they'd force the woods to move
 Still higher up the mountain, and to yield
 The place below for tilth, that there they might,
 On plains and uplands, have their meadow-plats,
 Cisterns and runnels, crops of standing grain,
 And happy vineyards, and that all along
 O'er hillocks, intervales, and plains might run
 The silvery-green belt of olive-trees,
 Marking the plotted landscape; even as now
 Thou seest so marked with varied loveliness
 All the terrain which men adorn and plant
 With rows of goodly fruit-trees and hedge round
 With thriving shrubberies sown.

                               But by the mouth
 To imitate the liquid notes of birds
 Was earlier far 'mongst men than power to make,
 By measured song, melodious verse and give
 Delight to ears. And whistlings of the wind
 Athrough the hollows of the reeds first taught
 The peasantry to blow into the stalks
 Of hollow hemlock-herb. Then bit by bit
 They learned sweet plainings, such as pipe out-pours,
 Beaten by finger-tips of singing men,
 When heard through unpathed groves and forest deeps
 And woodsy meadows, through the untrod haunts
 Of shepherd folk and spots divinely still.
 Thus time draws forward each and everything
 Little by little unto the midst of men,
 And reason uplifts it to the shores of light.
 These tunes would soothe and glad the minds of mortals
 When sated with food,--for songs are welcome then.
 And often, lounging with friends in the soft grass
 Beside a river of water, underneath
 A big tree's branches, merrily they'd refresh
 Their frames, with no vast outlay--most of all
 If the weather were smiling and the times of the year
 Were painting the green of the grass around with flowers.
 Then jokes, then talk, then peals of jollity
 Would circle round; for then the rustic muse
 Was in her glory; then would antic Mirth
 Prompt them to garland head and shoulders about
 With chaplets of intertwined flowers and leaves,
 And to dance onward, out of tune, with limbs
 Clownishly swaying, and with clownish foot
 To beat our mother earth--from whence arose
 Laughter and peals of jollity, for, lo,
 Such frolic acts were in their glory then,
 Being more new and strange. And wakeful men
 Found solaces for their unsleeping hours
 In drawing forth variety of notes,
 In modulating melodies, in running
 With puckered lips along the tuned reeds,
 Whence, even in our day do the watchmen guard
 These old traditions, and have learned well
 To keep true measure. And yet they no whit
 Do get a larger fruit of gladsomeness
 Than got the woodland aborigines
 In olden times. For what we have at hand--
 If theretofore naught sweeter we have known--
 That chiefly pleases and seems best of all;
 But then some later, likely better, find
 Destroys its worth and changes our desires
 Regarding good of yesterday.

                              And thus
 Began the loathing of the acorn; thus
 Abandoned were those beds with grasses strewn
 And with the leaves beladen. Thus, again,
 Fell into new contempt the pelts of beasts--
 Erstwhile a robe of honour, which, I guess,
 Aroused in those days envy so malign
 That the first wearer went to woeful death
 By ambuscades,--and yet that hairy prize,
 Rent into rags by greedy foemen there
 And splashed by blood, was ruined utterly
 Beyond all use or vantage. Thus of old
 'Twas pelts, and of to-day 'tis purple and gold
 That cark men's lives with cares and weary with war.
 Wherefore, methinks, resides the greater blame
 With us vain men to-day: for cold would rack,
 Without their pelts, the naked sons of earth;
 But us it nothing hurts to do without
 The purple vestment, broidered with gold
 And with imposing figures, if we still
 Make shift with some mean garment of the Plebs.
 So man in vain futilities toils on
 Forever and wastes in idle cares his years--
 Because, of very truth, he hath not learnt
 What the true end of getting is, nor yet
 At all how far true pleasure may increase.
 And 'tis desire for better and for more
 Hath carried by degrees mortality
 Out onward to the deep, and roused up
 From the far bottom mighty waves of war.

 But sun and moon, those watchmen of the world,
 With their own lanterns traversing around
 The mighty, the revolving vault, have taught
 Unto mankind that seasons of the years
 Return again, and that the Thing takes place
 After a fixed plan and order fixed.

 Already would they pass their life, hedged round
 By the strong towers; and cultivate an earth
 All portioned out and boundaried; already
 Would the sea flower and sail-winged ships;
 Already men had, under treaty pacts,
 Confederates and allies, when poets began
 To hand heroic actions down in verse;
 Nor long ere this had letters been devised--
 Hence is our age unable to look back
 On what has gone before, except where reason
 Shows us a footprint.

                      Sailings on the seas,
 Tillings of fields, walls, laws, and arms, and roads,
 Dress and the like, all prizes, all delights
 Of finer life, poems, pictures, chiselled shapes
 Of polished sculptures--all these arts were learned
 By practice and the mind's experience,
 As men walked forward step by eager step.
 Thus time draws forward each and everything
 Little by little into the midst of men,
 And reason uplifts it to the shores of light.
 For one thing after other did men see
 Grow clear by intellect, till with their arts
 They've now achieved the supreme pinnacle.