Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/53

 whither are you holding on your journey?" That question he answers thus, with a heavy sigh, and a voice fetched from the bottom of his heart:—

"Fair goddess! should I begin from the first and proceed in order, and hadst thou leisure to listen to the chronicle     5 of our sufferings, eve would first close the Olympian gates and lay the day to sleep. For us, bound from ancient Troy, if the name of Troy has ever chanced to pass through a Tyrian ear, wanderers over divers seas already, we have been driven by a storm's wild will upon your Libyan          10 coasts. I am Æneas, styled the good, who am bearing with me in my fleet the gods of Troy rescued from the foe; a name blazed by rumour above the stars. I am in quest of Italy, looking there for an ancestral home, and a pedigree drawn from high Jove himself. With twice ten        15 ships I climbed the Phrygian main, with a goddess mother guiding me on my way, and a chart of oracles to follow. Scarce seven remain to me now, shattered by wind and wave. Here am I, a stranger, nay, a beggar, wandering over your Libyan deserts, driven from Europe and Asia       20 alike." Venus could bear the complaint no longer, so she thus struck into the middle of his sorrows:—

"Whoever you are, it is not, I trow, under the frown of heavenly powers that you draw the breath of life,[o] thus to have arrived at our Tyrian town. Only go on, and make       25 your way straight hence to the queen's palace. For I give you news that your comrades are returned and your fleet brought back, wafted into shelter by shifting gales, unless my learning of augury was vain, and the parents who taught me cheats. Look at these twelve swans             30 exultant in victorious column, which the bird of Jove,[o] swooping from the height of ether, was just now driving in confusion over the wide unsheltered sky; see now how their line stretches, some alighting on the ground, others just looking down on those alighted. As they, thus rallied,      35 ply their whirring wings[o] in sport, spreading their train round the sky, and uttering songs of triumph, even so your vessels and your gallant crews are either safe in the