Note 34 — Chapter XIV

But it is in describing actual scenes and actual aspects of human life that Lucretius chiefly employs his power of poetical conception and expression. He looks upon the world with an eye which discerns beneath the outward appearances of things the presence of Nature in her attributes both of majesty and of genial all-penetrating life,—as at once the 'Magna mater' and the 'alma mater' of all living things34. She appears to his imagination not as an abstraction, or a vast aggregate of forces and laws, but as a living Power, whose processes are on an infinitely grander scale, but are yet analogous to the active and moral energies of man. He shows the same sympathy with this life of Nature, the same vivid sense of wonder and delight in her familiar aspects, the same imaginative perception of her secret agency, which led the early Greek mind to people the world with the living forms of the old mythology, and which have been felt anew by the great poets of the present century. All natural life is thus endowed with a poetical interest, as being a new manifestation of the creative energy, which is the fountain of all beauty and delight in the world.