Trouble vacate your bosom, and Peace hold holiday in you. But, if (again) all this be a vain impossible fiction; If of a truth men’s fears, and the cares which hourly beset them, Heed not the jav’lin’s fury, regard not clashing of broadswords; But all-boldly amongst crowned heads and the rulers of empires Stalk, not shrinking abashed from the dazzling glare of the red gold, Not from the pomp of the monarch, who walks forth purple-apparelled: These things shew that at times we are bankrupt, surely, of Reason; When too all Man’s life through a great Dark laboureth onward. For, as a young boy trembles, and in that mystery, Darkness, Sees all terrible things: so do we too, ev’n in the daylight, Ofttimes shudder at that, which is not more really alarming Than boys’ fears, when they waken, and say some danger is o’er them. So this panic of mind, these clouds which gather around us, Fly not the bright sunbeam, nor the ivory shafts of the Day-star: Nature, rightly revealed, and the Reason only, dispel them. Now, how moving about do the prime material atoms Shape forth this thing and that thing; and, once shaped, how they resolve them; What power says unto each, This must be; how an inherent Elasticity drives them about Space vagrantly onward;— I shall unfold: thou simply give all thyself to my teaching. Matter mingled and massed into indissoluble union Does not exist. For we see how wastes each separate substance; So flow piecemeal away, with the length’ning centuries, all things, Till from our eye by degrees that old self passes, and is not. Still Universal Nature abides unchanged as aforetime. Whereof this is the cause. When the atoms part from a substance, That suffers loss; but another is elsewhere gaining an increase: So that, as one thing wanes, still a second bursts into blossom, Soon, in its turn, to be left. Thus draws this Universe always Gain out of loss; thus live we mortals one on another. Bourgeons one generation, and one fades. Let but a few years Pass, and a race has arisen which was not: as in a racecourse, One hands on to another the burning torch of Existence. FROM HOMER. _Il_. I.