Your true Tityus, gnawed by the vulture, is only the slave of passion and
of love; your true Sisyphus (like Lord Salisbury in _Punch_) is only the
politician, striving always, never attaining; the stone rolls down again
from the hill-crest, and thunders far along the plain.

Thus his philosophy, which gives him such a delightful sense of freedom,
is rejected after all these years of trial by men. They feel that since
those remotest days

"_Quum Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum_,"

they have travelled the long, the weary way Lucretius describes to little
avail, if they may not keep their hopes and fears. Robbed of these we
are robbed of all; it serves us nothing to have conquered the soil and
fought the winds and waves, to have built cities, and tamed fire, if the
world is to be "dispeopled of its dreams." Better were the old life we
started from, and dreams therewith, better the free days--

"_Novitas tum florida mundi_
_Pabula dia tulit, miseris mortablibus ampla_;"

than wealth or power, and neither hope nor fear, but one certain end of
all before the eyes of all.

Thus the heart of man has answered, and will answer Lucretius, the
noblest Roman poet, and the least beloved, who sought, at last, by his
own hand, they say, the doom that Virgil waited for in the season
appointed.