ye unclean!" cries the seer.
"Be far away! ah, get ye gone from all the holy wood!
But thou, AEneas, draw thy steel and take thee to the road; 260
Now needeth all thine hardihood and steadfast heart and brave."

She spake, and wildly cast herself amidst the hollow cave,
But close upon her fearless feet AEneas followeth.

O Gods, who rule the ghosts of men, O silent shades of death,
Chaos and Phlegethon, hushed lands that lie beneath the night!
Let me speak now, for I have heard: O aid me with your might
To open things deep sunk in earth, and mid the darkness blent.

All dim amid the lonely night on through the dusk they went,
On through the empty house of Dis, the land of nought at all.
E'en as beneath the doubtful moon, when niggard light doth fall 270
Upon some way amid the woods, when God hath hidden heaven,
And black night from the things of earth the colours dear hath driven.

Lo, in the first of Orcus' jaws, close to the doorway side,
The Sorrows and Avenging Griefs have set their beds to bide;
There the pale kin of Sickness dwells, and Eld, the woeful thing,
And Fear, and squalid-fashioned Lack, and witless Hungering,
Shapes terrible to see with eye; and Toil of Men, and Death,
And Sleep, Death's brother, and the Lust of Soul that sickeneth:
And War, the death-bearer, was set full in the threshold's way,
And those Well-willers' iron beds: there heartless Discord lay, 280
Whose viper-breeding hair about was bloody-filleted.

But in the midst a mighty elm, dusk as the night, outspread
Its immemorial boughs and limbs, where lying dreams there lurk,
As tells the tale, still clinging close 'neath every leaf-side mirk.
Withal most wondrous, many-shaped are all the wood-beasts there;
The Centaurs stable by the porch, and twi-shaped Scyllas fare,
And hundred-folded Briareus, and Lerna's Worm of dread
Fell hissing; and Chimaera's length and fire-behelmed head,
Gorgons and Harpies, and the shape of that three-bodied Shade.
Then smitten by a sudden fear AEneas caught his blade, 290
And turned the naked point and edge against their drawing nigh;
And but for her wise word that these were thin lives flitting by
All bodiless, and wrapped about in hollow shape and vain,
With idle sword had he set on to cleave the ghosts atwain.

To Acheron of