Briareus hundred-handed, Gorgons dire,
Harpies, the triple Shade, Chimaera fenced with fire.

XL. At once AEneas, stirred by sudden fear,
Clutches his sword, and points the naked blade
To affront them. Then, but that the Heaven-taught seer
Warned him that each was but an empty shade,
A shapeless soul, vain onset he had made,
And slashed the shadows. So he checked his hand,
And past the gateway in the gloom they strayed
Through Tartarus to Acheron's dark strand,
Where thick the whirlpool boils, and voids the seething sand

XLI. Into the deep Cocytus. Charon there,
Grim ferryman, stands sentry. Mean his guise,
His chin a wilderness of hoary hair,
And like a flaming furnace stare his eyes.
Hung in a loop around his shoulders lies
A filthy gaberdine. He trims the sail,
And, pole in hand, across the water plies
His steel-grey shallop with the corpses pale,
Old, but a god's old age has left him green and hale.

XLII. There shoreward rushed a multitude, the shades
Of noble heroes, numbered with the dead,
Boys, husbands, mothers and unwedded maids,
Sons on the pile before their parents spread,
As leaves in number, which the trees have shed
When Autumn's frosts begin to chill the air,
Or birds, that from the wintry blasts have fled
And over seas to sunnier shores repair.
So thick the foremost stand, and, stretching hands of prayer,

XLIII. Plead for a passage. Now the boatman stern
Takes these, now those, then thrusts the rest away,
And vainly for the distant bank they yearn.
Then spake AEneas, for with strange dismay
He viewed the tumult, "Prithee, maiden, say
What means this thronging to the river-side?
What seek the souls? Why separate, do they
Turn back, while others sweep the leaden tide?
Who parts the shades, what doom the difference can decide?"

XLIV. Thereto in brief the aged priestess spake:
"Son of Anchises, and the god's true heir,
Thou see'st Cocytus and the Stygian lake,
By whose dread majesty no god will dare
His solemn oath attested to forswear.
These are the needy, who a burial crave;
The ferryman is Charon; they who fare
Across the flood, the buried; none that wave
Can traverse, ere his bones have rested in the grave.

XLV. "A hundred years they wander in the cold
Around these shores, till at the destined date
The wished-for pools, admitted, they b