Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/175

 Æneas masters the approach while the warder sleeps, and swiftly passes from the bank of the river without return.

At once there breaks on his ear a voice of mighty wailing, infant spirits sobbing and crying on the threshold, babes that, portionless of the sweets of life, were snatched     5 from the breast by the black death-day's tyranny, and whelmed in untimely night. Next to them are those who were done to death by false accusation. Yet let none think that the lot of award or the judge's sentence are wanting here. There sits Minos,[o] the president, urn       10 in hand: he summons an assembly of the speechless, and takes cognizance of earthly lives and earthly sins.

Next to them comes the dwelling-place of the sons of sorrow, who, though guiltless, procured their own death by violence, and, for mere hatred of the sunshine, flung their     15 lives away. Oh, how gladly would they now, in the air above, bear to the end the load of poverty and the full extremity of toil! But Fate bars the way: the unlovely pool swathes them round in her doleful waters, and Styx, with her ninefold windings, keeps them fast. 20

Not far hence the traveller's eye sees stretching on every side the Mourning Fields: such the name they bear. Here dwell those whom cruel Love's consuming tooth has eaten to the heart, in the privacy of hidden walks and an enshrouding myrtle wood: their tender sorrows            25 quit them not even in death. In this region he sees Phædra and Procris, and sad Eriphyle, pointing to the wounds of her ruthless son, and Evadne, and Pasiphaë: along with them moves Laodamia, and Cæneus, once a man, now a woman, brought back by the turn of fate to           30 her former self. Among these was Phœnicia's daughter, Dido, fresh from her death-wound, wandering in that mighty wood: soon as the Trojan hero stood at her side, and knew her, looming dimly through the dusk—as a man sees or thinks he sees through the clouds, when the         35 month is young, the rising moon—his tears broke forth, and he addressed her tenderly and lovingly. "Unhappy Dido! and was it then a true messenger that reached