Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/165

 what city in Italy will not have had you knocking at its gates! Once more will an alien bride bring on the Teucrians all this woe—once more a foreign bed. But you, yield not to affliction, but go forth all the bolder to meet it, so far as your destiny gives you leave. The first glimpse of     5 safety, little as you dream it, shall dawn on you from a Grecian town."

Such are the words with which Cumæ's Sibyl from her cell shrills forth awful mysteries and booms again from the cavern, robing her truth in darkness—such the violence     10 with which Apollo shakes the bridle in her frenzied mouth and plies her bosom with his goad. Soon as her frenzy abated and the madness of her lips grew calm, Æneas the hero began: "No feature, awful maiden, that suffering can show rises on my sight new or unlooked-for—I have                   15 foreseen all and scanned all in fancy already. I have but one prayer to make: since here it is that Fame tells of the gate of the infernal monarch, and the murky pool of Acheron's overflow, grant me to pass to the sight, to the presence of my loved father—teach the way, and unlock            20 the sacred doors. Him I bore away through flames and a driving tempest of darts on these my shoulders and rescued him from the midst of the foe: he was the companion of my journey, and encountered with me all the waves of ocean, all the terrors of sea and sky in his own             25 feeble frame, beyond the strength and the day of old age. Nay more—that I would kneel to thee and approach thy dwelling—this was his charge, his oft-repeated prayer. Oh, of thy grace, pity the son and the sire; for thou art all-powerful, nor is it for nought that Hecate has set thee          30 over the groves of Avernus. If Orpheus had the power to fetch back the shade of his wife, by the help of his Thracian lyre and its sounding strings—if Pollux redeemed his brother by dying in turn with him, and went and returned on the path those many times—why talk of Theseus,                   35 why of great Alcides[o]? my line, like theirs, is from Jove most high."

Such were his prayers, while his hands clasped the altar,