This work is a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let us kiss and drink while it lasts. The doctrine of Lucretius is to a certain extent similar, but is sterner and more intellectual in its form. I accordingly selected from his great scientific poem, which contains in embryo all the substance of the modern doctrine of evolution, those passages which bear on the meaning of man's existence. I arranged these in logical order, and translated or paraphrased them in the meter with which Fitzgerald has familiarized and fascinated the English ear, so that the philosophy of the Persian and the Roman might be reduced to something like a common denominator. Lucretius is so far a pessimist that, under existing conditions, human life is for him no more than a hideous nightmare; but he is so far an optimist that he looks upon all this misery as due to one removable cause, this cause being the prevalence of one mistaken belief, which a true scientific philosophy will altogether eradicate. The belief in question is a belief in a personal God, who is offended by the very nature of man, and who watches with a wrathful eye by the deathbed of each human creature, in order to begin a torture of him which will last for all eternity. Man's true savior, Lucretius argues, is science, which makes this belief ridiculous by showing clearly that all individual things--human beings included--are nothing but atomic aggregations, which, having been formed for a moment, dissolve and disappear for ever. How, then, can any avenging God be anything more than the distempered dream of children? How could such a God torture men when they die, since as soon as they are dead there is nothing left to torture? Let them cast this incubus of irrational fear behind them, and the mere process of life may then be tolerable enough. It may even, in a sober way, be happy. It certainly need not be, as it now is, miserable; and at all events it will be pleasing as a prelude to the luxury of an endless sleep. Of my own rendering of the great Lucretian message, I may here give a few stanzas as specimens: Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze Go off. Those mooned sands forsake their place; And where they are shall other seas in turn Mow with their sands of whiteness other bays. How, then, the poet asks, shall the individual man be more enduring than these? What, shall the dateless worlds in dust be blown Back to the unremembered and unknown, And this frail Thou--this flame of yesterday-- Burn on forlorn, immortal and alone? What though there lurks behind yon veil of sky Some fabled Maker, some immortal Spy, Ready to torture each poor thing he made? Thou canst do more than God can. Thou canst die.