pathetic tenderness. In the midst of her taunts and menaces she turns
with a woman's delicacy to protest against her own violence, "heu,
furiis incensa feror!" She humbles herself even to pray for a little
respite, if but for a few hours.[10] She pleads her very loneliness; she
catches as it were from AEneas the thought of the boy whose future he had
pleaded as one cause of his departure and finds in it a plea for pity.

Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech; she can only answer with
those "speechless eyes" with which her shade was once more to meet AEneas
in the Elysian fields. But her wonderful energy forbids her to lie, like
weaker women, crushed in her despair. She hurries her sister to the feet
of her lover that nothing may be left untried. From the first she stakes
her life on the issue; it is as one "about to die" that she prays AEneas
not to leave her. When all has failed and hope itself deserts her the
weariness of life gathers round and she "tires of the sight of day."

Never have the mighty energies of unbridled human will been wrought up
into a form of more surpassing beauty; never have they been set more
boldly and sharply against the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
self-control. If the tide of Dido's passion sweeps away for the moment
the consciousness of a divine mission which has borne AEneas to the
Tyrian shore, the consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man
and revives at the new call of the gods. The call bids him depart at
once; and without a struggle he "burns to depart." He stamps down and
hides within the deep recesses of his heart the "care" that the wild
entreaties of the woman he loved arouse within him; the life that had
swung for an hour out of its course returns to its old bearings; once
more Italy and his destiny become aim and fatherland, "hic amor, haec
patria est." AEneas bows to the higher will, and from that moment all
that has turned him from his course is of the past. Dido becomes a part
of his memory as of the things that were.[11]

AEneas is as "resolute to depart" as Dido is "resolute to die." And in
both the resolve lifts the soul out of its lower passion-life into a
nobler air. The queen rises into her old queenliness as she passes
"majestic to the grave;" and her last curse as the Tyrian ships quit
her shore is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied woman; it is
the mighty curse of the founder of a people calling down on the Roman
race ages of