Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/182

 stand rooted in the ground, and their unyoked steeds graze dispersedly over the meadow. All the delight they took when alive in chariots and armour, all their pride in grooming and feeding their horses, goes with them underground, and animates them there. See, too, his eye rests     5 on others regaling on either hand upon the grass, and singing in chorus a joyous pæan, all in a fragrant grove of bay, the source whence, welling forth into the upper world, Eridanus[o] flows in broad current between his wooded banks. Here is a noble company who braved       10 wounds in fight for fatherland; all the priests who kept their purity while life was; all the poets whose hearts were clean, and their songs worthy Phœbus' ear; all who by cunning inventions gave a grace to life, and whose worthy deeds made their fellows think of them with love:    15 each has his brow cinctured with a snow-white fillet. Looking on the multitude as it streamed around, the Sibyl bespoke them thus—Musæus before all; for he stands the centre of that vast crowd, which looks up to him, as with rising shoulders he towers above them:      20 "Tell us, happy spirits, and you, best of bards, which is Anchises' haunt? which his home? for it is to see him that we have come hither, and won our way over the mighty river of Erebus." Instant the hero replied in brief: "Here there are no fixed abodes: our dwellings are in     25 shadowy groves: our settlements on the velvet slope of banks and meadows fresh with running streams. But come, if you will, climb this hill with me, and I will set your feet at once on a road that will lead you." So saying, he moves on before, and from the top of the ridge      30 points to broad fields of light, while they descend from the summit.

But father Anchises, down in the depth of the green dell, was surveying with fond observance the spirits now confined there, but hereafter to pass into the light of day,     35 and scanning, as chance would have it, the whole multitude of his people, even his loved posterity, their destinies, their warrior deeds, their ways and their works.