And those which are the primal germs of things No power can quench; for in the end they conquer By their own solidness; though hard it be To think that aught in things has solid frame;For lightnings pass, no less than voice and shout, Through hedging walls of houses, and the iron White-dazzles in the fire, and rocks will burn With exhalations fierce and burst asunder.
Totters the rigid gold dissolved in heat;The ice of bronze melts conquered in the flame;Warmth and the piercing cold through silver seep, Since, with the cups held rightly in the hand, We oft feel both, as from above is poured The dew of waters between their shining sides:
So true it is no solid form is found.
But yet because true reason and nature of things Constrain us, come, whilst in few verses now I disentangle how there still exist Bodies of solid, everlasting frame-The seeds of things, the primal germs we teach, Whence all creation around us came to be.
First since we know a twofold nature exists, Of things, both twain and utterly unlike-Body, and place in which an things go on-Then each must be both for and through itself, And all unmixed: where'er be empty space, There body's not; and so where body bides, There not at all exists the void inane.
Thus primal bodies are solid, without a void.
But since there's void in all begotten things, All solid matter must be round the same;Nor, by true reason canst thou prove aught hides And holds a void within its body, unless Thou grant what holds it be a solid. Know, That which can hold a void of things within Can be naught else than matter in union knit.
Thus matter, consisting of a solid frame, Hath power to be eternal, though all else, Though all creation, be dissolved away.
Again, were naught of empty and inane, The world were then a solid; as, without Some certain bodies to fill the places held, The world that is were but a vacant void.
And so, infallibly, alternate-wise Body and void are still distinguished, Since nature knows no wholly full nor void.
There are, then, certain bodies, possessed of power To vary forever the empty and the full;And these can nor be sundered from without By beats and blows, nor from within be torn By penetration, nor be overthrown By any assault soever through the world-For without void, naught can be crushed, it seems, Nor broken, nor severed by a cut in twain, Nor can it take the damp, or seeping cold Or piercing fire, those old destroyers three;But the more void within a thing, the more Entirely it totters at their sure assault.
Thus if first bodies be, as I have taught, Solid, without a void, they must be then Eternal; and, if matter ne'er had been Eternal, long ere now had all things gone Back into nothing utterly, and all We see around from nothing had been born-But since I taught above that naught can be From naught created, nor the once begotten To naught be summoned back, these primal germs Must have an immortality of frame.
And into these must each thing be resolved, When comes its supreme hour, that thus there be At hand the stuff for plenishing the world.
. . . . . .
So primal germs have solid singleness Nor otherwise could they have been conserved Through aeons and infinity of time For the replenishment of wasted worlds.
Once more, if nature had given a scope for things To be forever broken more and more, By now the bodies of matter would have been So far reduced by breakings in old days That from them nothing could, at season fixed, Be born, and arrive its prime and top of life.
For, lo, each thing is quicker marred than made;And so whate'er the long infinitude Of days and all fore-passed time would now By this have broken and ruined and dissolved, That same could ne'er in all remaining time Be builded up for plenishing the world.
But mark: infallibly a fixed bound Remaineth stablished 'gainst their breaking down;Since we behold each thing soever renewed, And unto all, their seasons, after their kind, Wherein they arrive the flower of their age.
Again, if bounds have not been set against The breaking down of this corporeal world, Yet must all bodies of whatever things Have still endured from everlasting time Unto this present, as not yet assailed By shocks of peril. But because the same Are, to thy thinking, of a nature frail, It ill accords that thus they could remain (As thus they do) through everlasting time, Vexed through the ages (as indeed they are)By the innumerable blows of chance.
So in our programme of creation, mark How 'tis that, though the bodies of all stuff Are solid to the core, we yet explain The ways whereby some things are fashioned soft-Air, water, earth, and fiery exhalations-And by what force they function and go on:
The fact is founded in the void of things.
But if the primal germs themselves be soft, Reason cannot be brought to bear to show The ways whereby may be created these Great crags of basalt and the during iron;For their whole nature will profoundly lack The first foundations of a solid frame.
But powerful in old simplicity, Abide the solid, the primeval germs;And by their combinations more condensed, All objects can be tightly knit and bound And made to show unconquerable strength.
Again, since all things kind by kind obtain Fixed bounds of growing and conserving life;Since Nature hath inviolably decreed What each can do, what each can never do;Since naught is changed, but all things so abide That ever the variegated birds reveal The spots or stripes peculiar to their kind, Spring after spring: thus surely all that is Must be composed of matter immutable.
For if the primal germs in any wise Were open to conquest and to change, 'twould be Uncertain also what could come to birth And what could not, and by what law to each Its scope prescribed, its boundary stone that clings So deep in Time. Nor could the generations Kind after kind so often reproduce The nature, habits, motions, ways of life, Of their progenitors.
And then again, Since there is ever an extreme bounding point . . . . . .
