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52 heroes and their deeds: it is the song of Silenus, in the Pastorals, over again—the favourite subject of the poet, the wonders of nature and creation.

He sings the wanderings of the moon,

The sun eclipsed in deadly swoon;

Whence humankind and cattle came,

And whence the rain-spout and the flame,

Arcturus and the two bright bears,

And Hyads weeping showery tears;

Why winter suns so swiftly go,

And why the winter nights move slow."

All the while, during the song and the banquet, the queen is fondling the fair boy, who sits next to her. Unhappy Dido! it is Cupid, the god of love, who, at his false mother's bidding, has assumed the shape of Æneas's young son. The true Ascanius lies fast bound in an enchanted sleep, by Venus's machinations, in her bower in the far island of Cythera; and the Tyrian queen is nursing unawares in her bosom the passion which is to be her ruin. Æneas has already become an object of tender interest to her. She hangs upon his lips, like Desdemona on Othello's:—

Much of great Priam asks the dame,

Much of his greater son;

Now in what armour Memnon came,

Now how Achilles shone."

Above all, she begs of him to tell his own story—his escape and his seven years' wanderings. And Æneas begins; and, with an exact imitation of Homer's management of his story, like Ulysses in the court of Alcinous, retraces his adventures from the last fatal night of Troy.