“Were then the Nature of Created Things To rise abrupt, and thus repining man Address:—’O mortal! whence these useless fears? This weak, superfluous sorrow? why the approach Dread’st thou of death? For if the time elapsed Have smiled propitious, and not all its gifts, As if adventured in a leaky vase, Been idly wasted, profitless, and vain— Why quitt’st thou not, thou fool! the feast of life Filled, and with mind all panting for repose? But if thyself have squandered every boon, And of the past grown weary—why demand More days to kill, more blessings to pervert, Nor rather headlong hasten to thine end?’ Were Nature thus to address us, could we fail To feel the justice of her keen rebuke? So true the picture, the advice so sage! But to the wretch who moans the approach of death With grief unmeasured, louder might she raise Her voice severe:—’Vile coward! dry thine eyes— Hence with thy snivelling sorrows, and depart!’ Should he, moreo’er, have passed man’s mid-day hour— ‘What! thou lament, already who hast reaped An ample harvest? By desiring thus The past once more, the present thou abhorr’st, And life flies on imperfect, unenjoyed, And death untimely meets thee, ere thy soul, Cloyed with the banquet, is prepared to rise. Leave, then, to others bliss thy years should shun; Come, cheerful leave it, since still leave thou must.’ Justly, I deem, might Nature thus reprove: For, through creation, old to young resigns, And this from that matures; nor aught descends To the dread gulfs, the fancied shades of hell. The mass material must survive entire To feed succeeding ages, which, in turn, Like thee shall flourish, and like thee shall die; Nor more the present ruins than the past. Thus things from things ascend; and life exists To none a freehold, but a use to all. Reflect, moreo’er, how less than naught to us Weighs the long portion of eternal time Fled ere our birth: so, too, the future weighs When death dissolves us. What of horror, then, Dwells there in death? what gloomy, what austere? Can there be elsewhere slumber half so sound?” JOHN MASON GOOD. Lucretius reasons plausibly, but on some points, it is too evident, unsatisfactorily even to himself. His work contains much that is worthy of praise, but this only makes its atheistical tendencies more dangerous. It was left unfinished at the poet’s death, to be revised and edited by other hands.