lighter guilt abide a year in Tartarus, and then drift out down the
streams Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon. Thence they reach the marsh of
Acheron, but are not released until they have received the pardon of the
souls whom in life they had injured.

All this, and much more to the same purpose in other dialogues of
Plato's, appears to have been derived by Socrates from the popular
unphilosophic traditions, from Folk-lore in short, and to have been
raised by him to the rank of "pious opinion," if not of dogma. Now,
Lucretius represents nothing but the reaction against all this dread of
future doom, whether that dread was inculcated by Platonic philosophy or
by popular belief. The latter must have been much the more powerful and
widely diffused. It follows that the Romans, at least, must have been
haunted by a constant dread of judgment to come, from which, but for the
testimony of Lucretius and his manifest sincerity, we might have believed
them free.

Perhaps we may regret the existence of this Roman religion, for it did
its best to ruin a great poet. The sublimity of the language of
Lucretius, when he can leave his attempts at scientific proof, the
closeness of his observation, his enjoyment of life, of Nature, and his
power of painting them, a certain largeness of touch, and noble amplitude
of manner--these, with a burning sincerity, mark him above all others
that smote the Latin lyre. Yet these great qualities are half-crushed by
his task, by his attempt to turn the atomic theory into verse, by his
unsympathetic effort to destroy all faith and hope, because these were
united, in his mind, with dread of Styx and Acheron.

It is an almost intolerable philosophy, the philosophy of eternal sleep,
without dreams and without awakening. This belief is wholly divorced