Page:Aeneid (Conington 1866).djvu/210

186 The threshold passed, the road leads on

To Tartarus and to Acheron.

At distance rolls the infernal flood,

Seething and swollen with turbid mud,

And into dark Cocytus pours

The burden of its oozy stores.

Grim, squalid, foul, with aspect dire,

His eye-balls each a globe of fire,

The watery passage Charon keeps,

Sole warden of those murky deeps:

A sordid mantle round him thrown

Girds breast and shoulder like a zone.

He plies the pole with dexterous ease,

Or sets the sail to catch the breeze,

Ferrying the legions of the dead

In bark of dusky iron-red,

Now marked with age; but heavenly powers

Have fresher, greener eld than ours.

Towards the ferry and the shore

The multitudinous phantoms pour;

Matrons, and men, and heroes dead,

And boys and maidens, yet unwed,

And youths who funeral fires have fed

Before their eye:

Dense as the leaves that from the treen

Float down when autumn first is keen,

Or as the birds that thickly massed

Fly landward from the ocean vast,

Driven over sea by wintry blast

To seek a sunnier sky.

Each in pathetic suppliance stands,

So may he first be ferried o'er,

And stretches out his helpless hands

In yearning for the further shore:

The ferryman, austere and stern,

Takes these and those in varying turn,