Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/135

 *bracing and fondling in her bosom her dying sister, and stanching with her robe the black streams of blood. Dido strives to raise her heavy eyes, and sinks down again, the deep stab gurgles in her breast. Thrice, with an effort, she lifted and reared herself up on her elbow;       5 thrice, she fell back on the couch, and with helpless wandering eyes aloft in the sky, sought for the light and groaned when she found it.

Then Juno almighty, in compassion for her lengthened agony and her trouble in dying, sent down Iris[o] from       10 Olympus to part the struggling soul and its prison of flesh. For, as she was dying, not in the course of fate, nor for any crime of hers, but in mere misery, before her time, the victim of sudden frenzy, not yet had Proserpine[o] carried off a lock of her yellow hair, and thus doomed her head to       15 Styx and the place of death. So then Iris glides down the sky with saffron wings dew-besprent, trailing a thousand various colours in the face of the sun, and alights above her head. "This I am bidden to bear away as an offering to Pluto, and hereby set you free from the body." 20 So saying, she stretches her hand and cuts the lock: at once all heat parts from the frame, and the life has passed into air.