30 COSMOS. 



disposition to practical activity, the Romans, with the cold 

 severity and practical understanding of their national charac- 

 ter, were less susceptible of impressions of the senses than the 

 Greeks, and were more devoted to every-day reality than to 

 the idealizing poetic contemplation of nature. These difier- 

 ences in the habits and feelings of the Greeks and Romans 

 are reflected in their literature, as is ever the case with the 

 intellectual expression of national character. Here, too, we 

 must notice the acknowledged difference that exists in the or- 

 ganic structure of their respective languages, notwithstanding 

 the affinity between the races. The language of ancient La- 

 tium possesses less flexibility, a more limited adaptation of 

 words, a stronger character of "practical tendency" than of 

 ideal mobility. Moreover, the predilection evinced in the Au- 

 gustan age for imitating Greek images must have been detri- 

 mental to the free outpouring of native feelings, and to the 

 free expression of the natural bent of the mind ; but still there 

 were some powerful minds, which, inspired by love of coun- 

 try, were able by creative individuahty, by elevation of 

 thought, and by the gentle grace of their representations, to 

 surmount all these obstacles. The great poem of nature, 

 which Lucretius has so richly decked with the charms of his 

 poetic genius, embraces the whole Cosmos. It has much af- 

 finity with the writings of Empedocle^ and Parmenides, the 

 archaic diction of the versification heightening the earnest- 

 ness of the descriptions. Poetry is here closely interwoven 

 with philosophy, without, however, falling into that frigidity 

 of style which, in contrast with Plato's richly fanciful mode 

 of treating nature, was so severely blamed by Menander the 

 Rhetorician, in the sentence he pronounced on the Hymns of 

 Nature.* My brother has shown with much ingenuity the 

 striking analogies and differences which have arisen from the 

 amalgamation of metaphysical abstractions with poetry in the 

 ancient Greek didactic poems, as in the works of Lucretius, 

 and in the episode Bhagavad of the Indian Epic Mahabhar- 



* Menandri Rhetoris Comment, de Encomiis, ex rec. Heeren, 1785, 

 sect, i., cap. 5, p. 38, 39. The severe critic terms the didactic poem 

 On Nature a frigid composition {ipvxporepov), in which the forces of na- 

 ture are brought forward divested of their personality — Apollo as light, 

 Hera as the concentration of all the phenomena of the atmosphere, and 

 Jupiter as heat. Plutai'ch also ridicules the so-call»d poems of nature, 

 which have only the fonn of poetry {de And. Poet., p. 27, Steph.). Ac- 

 coi'ding to the Stagirite {de Poet., c. i.), Empedocles was more a phys- 

 iologist than a poet, and has nothing in common with Homer but the 

 rhythmical measure used by both. 



