第48章

Indeed your earthly beacons of the night, The hanging lampions and the torches, bright With darting gleams and dense with livid soot, Do hurry in like manner to supply With ministering heat new light amain;Are all alive to quiver with their fires,-Are so alive, that thus the light ne'er leaves The spots it shines on, as if rent in twain:

So speedily is its destruction veiled By the swift birth of flame from all the fires.

Thus, then, we must suppose that sun and moon And stars dart forth their light from under-births Ever and ever new, and whatso flames First rise do perish always one by one-Lest, haply, thou shouldst think they each endure Inviolable.

Again, perceivest not How stones are also conquered by Time?-Not how the lofty towers ruin down, And boulders crumble?- Not how shrines of gods And idols crack outworn?- Nor how indeed The holy Influence hath yet no power There to postpone the Terminals of Fate, Or headway make 'gainst Nature's fixed decrees?

Again, behold we not the monuments Of heroes, now in ruins, asking us, In their turn likewise, if we don't believe They also age with eld? Behold we not The rended basalt ruining amain Down from the lofty mountains, powerless To dure and dree the mighty forces there Of finite time?- for they would never fall Rended asudden, if from infinite Past They had prevailed against all engin'ries Of the assaulting aeons, with no crash.

Again, now look at This, which round, above, Contains the whole earth in its one embrace:

If from itself it procreates all things-

As some men tell- and takes them to itself When once destroyed, entirely must it be Of mortal birth and body; for whate'er From out itself giveth to other things Increase and food, the same perforce must be Minished, and then recruited when it takes Things back into itself.

Besides all this, If there had been no origin-in-birth Of lands and sky, and they had ever been The everlasting, why, ere Theban war And obsequies of Troy, have other bards Not also chanted other high affairs?

Whither have sunk so oft so many deeds Of heroes? Why do those deeds live no more, Ingrafted in eternal monuments Of glory? Verily, I guess, because The Sum is new, and of a recent date The nature of our universe, and had Not long ago its own exordium.

Wherefore, even now some arts are being still Refined, still increased: now unto ships Is being added many a new device;And but the other day musician-folk Gave birth to melic sounds of organing;And, then, this nature, this account of things Hath been discovered latterly, and IMyself have been discovered only now, As first among the first, able to turn The same into ancestral Roman speech.

Yet if, percase, thou deemest that ere this Existed all things even the same, but that Perished the cycles of the human race In fiery exhalations, or cities fell By some tremendous quaking of the world, Or rivers in fury, after constant rains, Had plunged forth across the lands of earth And whelmed the towns- then, all the more must thou Confess, defeated by the argument, That there shall be annihilation too Of lands and sky.For at a time when things Were being taxed by maladies so great, And so great perils, if some cause more fell Had then assailed them, far and wide they would Have gone to disaster and supreme collapse.

And by no other reasoning are we Seen to be mortal, save that all of us Sicken in turn with those same maladies With which have sickened in the past those men Whom nature hath removed from life.

Again, Whatever abides eternal must indeed Either repel all strokes, because 'tis made Of solid body, and permit no entrance Of aught with power to sunder from within The parts compact- as are those seeds of stuff Whose nature we've exhibited before;Or else be able to endure through time For this: because they are from blows exempt, As is the void, the which abides untouched, Unsmit by any stroke; or else because There is no room around, whereto things can, As 'twere, depart in dissolution all,-Even as the sum of sums eternal is, Without or place beyond whereto things may Asunder fly, or bodies which can smite, And thus dissolve them by the blows of might.

But not of solid body, as I've shown, Exists the nature of the world, because In things is intermingled there a void;Nor is the world yet as the void, nor are, Moreover, bodies lacking which, percase, Rising from out the infinite, can fell With fury-whirlwinds all this sum of things, Or bring upon them other cataclysm Of peril strange; and yonder, too, abides The infinite space and the profound abyss-Whereinto, lo, the ramparts of the world Can yet be shivered.Or some other power Can pound upon them till they perish all.

Thus is the door of doom, O nowise barred Against the sky, against the sun and earth And deep-sea waters, but wide open stands And gloats upon them, monstrous and agape.

Wherefore, again, 'tis needful to confess That these same things are born in time; for things Which are of mortal body could indeed Never from infinite past until to-day Have spurned the multitudinous assaults Of the immeasurable aeons old.

Again, since battle so fiercely one with other The four most mighty members the world, Aroused in an all unholy war, Seest not that there may be for them an end Of the long strife?- Or when the skiey sun And all the heat have won dominion o'er The sucked-up waters all?- And this they try Still to accomplish, though as yet they fail,-For so aboundingly the streams supply New store of waters that 'tis rather they Who menace the world with inundations vast From forth the unplumbed chasms of the sea.

But vain- since winds (that over-sweep amain)And skiey sun (that with his rays dissolves)Do minish the level seas and trust their power To dry up all, before the waters can Arrive at the end of their endeavouring.