Come you by ocean-wanderings driven,
Or sent by warning voice from heaven?
What stress of fortune brings you here
Through sunless regions, waste and drear?’
Had passed the summit of the sky;
And so perchance had worn away
The period of the travellers’ stay,
But the good Sibyl thus in brief,
As comrade might, bespoke the chief:
‘Æneas, night approaches near:
While we lament, the hours career.
Here, at the spot where now we stand,
The road divides on either hand;
The right, which skirts the walls of Dis,
Conducts us to the fields of bliss:
The left gives sinners up to pain,
And leads to Tartarus’ guilty reign.’
‘Dread seer,’ Deiphobus replies,
‘Forgive, nor let thine anger rise.
The shadowy circle I complete,
And seek again my gloomy seat.
Pass on, proud boast of Ilium’s line,
And find a happier fate than mine.’
Thus he; and as the words he said
He turned, and in an instant fled.
When ’neath the left-hand cliff he spies
The bastions of a broad stronghold,
Engirt with walls of triple fold:
Fierce Phlegethon surrounds the same,
Foaming aloft with torrent flame,
And whirls his roaring rocks:
In front a portal stands displayed,
On adamantine columns stayed:
Nor mortal nor immortal foe
Those massy gates could overthrow
With battle’s direst shocks.
An iron tower of equal might
In air uprises steep:
Tisiphone, in red robes dight,
Sits on the threshold day and night
With eyes that know not sleep.
Hark! from within there issue groans,
The cracking of the thong,
The clank of iron o’er the stones
Dragged heavily along.
Æneas halted, and drank in
With startled ear the fiendish din:
‘What forms of crime are these?’ he cries,
‘What shapes of penal woe?
What piteous wails assault the skies?
O maid! I fain would know.’
‘Brave chief of Troy,’ returned the seer,
‘No soul from guilt’s pollution clear
May yon foul threshold tread:
But me when royal Hecat made
Controller of the Avernian shade,
The realms of torture she displayed,
And through their horrors led.
Stern monarch of these dark domains,
The Gnossian Rhadamanthus reigns:
He hears and judges each deceit,
And makes the soul those crimes declare,
Which, glorying in the empty cheat,
It veiled from sight in upper air.
Swift on the guilty, scourge in hand,
Leaps fell Tisiphone, and shakes
Full in their face her loathly snakes,
And calls her sister band.
Then, nor till then, the hinges grate,
And slowly opes the infernal gate.
See you who sits that gate to guard?
What presence there keeps watch and ward?
Within the Hydra’s direr shape
Sits with her fifty throats agape.
Then Tartarus with sheer descent
Dips ’neath the ghost-world twice as deep
As towers above earth’s continent
The height of heaven’s Olympian steep.
’Tis there the eldest born of earth,
The children of Titanic birth,
Hurled headlong by the lightning’s blast,
Deep in the lowest gulf are cast.
Aloeus’ sons there met my eyes,
Twin monsters of enormous size,
Who stormed the gate of heaven, and strove
From his high seat to pull down Jove.
Salmoneus too I saw in chains,
The victim of relentless pains,
While Jove’s own flame he tries to mock
And emulate the thunder-shock.
By four fleet coursers chariot-borne
And scattering brands in impious scorn
Through Elis’ streets he rode,
All Greece assisting at the show,
And claimed of fellow-men below
The honours of a God:
Fond fool! to think that thunderous crash
And heaven’s inimitable flash
Man’s puny craft could counterfeit
With rattling brass and horsehoofs’ beat.
Lo! from the sky the Almighty Sire
The levin-bolt’s authentic fire
’Mid thickest darkness sped
(No volley his of pine-wood smoke),
And with the inevitable stroke
Despatched him to the dead.
There too is Tityos the accurst,
By earth’s all-fostering bosom nurst:
O’er acres nine from end to end
His vast unmeasured limbs extend:
A vulture on his liver preys:
The liver fails not nor decays:
Still o’er that flesh, which breeds new pangs,
With crooked beak the torturer hangs,
Explores its depth with bloody fangs,
And searches for her food;
Still haunts the cavern of his breast,
Nor lets the filaments have rest,
To endless pain renewed.
Why should I name the Lapith race,
Pirithous and Ixion base?
A frowning rock their heads o’ertops,
Which ever nods and almost drops:
Couches where golden pillars shine
Invite them freely to recline,
And banquets smile before their eyne
With kingly splendour proud:
When lo! fell malice in her mien,
Beside them lies the Furies’ queen:
From the rich fare she bars their hand,
Thrusts in their face her sulphurous brand
And thunders hoarse and loud.
Here those who wronged a brother’s love,
Assailed a sire’s grey hair,
Or for a trustful client wove
A treachery and a snare,
Who wont on hoarded wealth to brood,
In sullen selfish solitude,
Nor called their friends to share the good
(The most in number they),
With those whom vengeance robbed of life
For guilty love of other’s wife,
And those who drew the unnatural sword,
Or broke the bond ’twixt slave and lord,
Await the reckoning-day.
Ask not their doom, nor seek to know
What depth receives them there below.
Some roll huge rocks up rising-ground,
Or hang, to whirling wheels fast bound:
There in the bottom of the pit
Sits Theseus, and will ever sit:
And Phlegyas warns the ghostly crowd,
Proclaiming through the shades aloud,
‘Behold, and learn to practice right,
Nor do the
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