HKB
dusky lairs The wriggling generations of wild snakes. How far removed from true reason is this, Perceive thou straight; for now I'll try to say Somewhat about the very fact.
And, first, This do I say, as oft I've said before: In earth are atoms of things of every sort; And know, these all thus rise from out the earth-- Many life-giving which be good for food, And many which can generate disease And hasten death, O many primal seeds Of many things in many modes--since earth Contains them mingled and gives forth discrete. And we have shown before that certain things Be unto certain creatures suited more For ends of life, by virtue of a nature, A texture, and primordial shapes, unlike For kinds alike. Then too 'tis thine to see How many things oppressive be and foul To man, and to sensation most malign: Many meander miserably through ears; Many in-wind athrough the nostrils too, Malign and harsh when mortal draws a breath; Of not a few must one avoid the touch; Of not a few must one escape the sight; And some there be all loathsome to the taste; And many, besides, relax the languid limbs Along the frame, and undermine the soul In its abodes within. To certain trees There hath been given so dolorous a shade That often they gender achings of the head, If one but be beneath, outstretched on the sward. There is, again, on Helicon's high hills A tree that's wont to kill a man outright By fetid odour of its very flower. And when the pungent stench of the night-lamp, Extinguished but a moment since, assails The nostrils, then and there it puts to sleep A man afflicted with the falling sickness And foamings at the mouth. A woman, too, At the heavy castor drowses back in chair, And from her delicate fingers slips away Her gaudy handiwork, if haply she Hath got the whiff at menstruation-time. Once more, if thou delayest in hot baths, When thou art over-full, how readily From stool in middle of the steaming water Thou tumblest in a fit! How readily The heavy fumes of charcoal wind their way Into the brain, unless beforehand we Of water 've drunk. But when a burning fever, O'ermastering man, hath seized upon his limbs, Then odour of wine is like a hammer-blow. And seest thou not how in the very earth Sulphur is gendered and bitumen thickens With noisome stench?--What direful stenches, too, Scaptensula out-breathes from down below, When men pursue the veins of silver and gold, With pick-axe probing round the hidden realms Deep in the earth?--Or what of deadly bane The mines of gold exhale? O what a look, And what a ghastly hue they give to men! And seest thou not, or hearest, how they're wont In little time to perish, and how fail The life-stores in those folk whom mighty power Of grim necessity confineth there In such a task? Thus, this telluric earth Out-streams with all these dread effluvia And breathes them out into the open world And into the visible regions under heaven.
Thus, too, those Birdless places must up-send An essence bearing death to winged things, Which from the earth rises into the breezes To poison part of skiey space, and when Thither the winged is on pennons borne, There, seized by the unseen poison, 'tis ensnared, And from the horizontal of its flight Drops to the spot whence sprang the effluvium. And when 'thas there collapsed, then the same power Of that effluvium takes from all its limbs The relics of its life. That power first strikes The creatures with a wildering dizziness, And then thereafter, when they're once down-fallen Into the poison's very fountains, then Life, too, they vomit out perforce, because So thick the stores of bane around them fume.