death; Take away the shipwreck: then death will be a gain to me.
'Tis something for one, either dying a natural death, or by the
sword, to lay his breathless corpse in the firm ground, and to
impart his wishes to his kindred, and to hope for a sepulchre, and
not to be food for the fishes of the sea.']

[Footnote 43: _A hurricane._--Ver. 548-9. 'Tanta vertigine pontus
Fervet' is transcribed by Clarke, 'The sea is confounded with so
great a vertigo.']

[Footnote 44: _The billows allow._--Ver. 566. 'Quoties sinit
hiscere fluctus' is rendered by Clarke, 'As oft as the waves
suffer him to gape.']

[Footnote 45: _A darkening arch._--Ver. 568. Possibly 'niger
arcus' means a sweeping wave, black with the sand which it has
swept from the depths of the ocean; or else with the reflection of
the dark clouds.]

[Footnote 46: _From the heavens._--Ver. 571. The word Olympus is
frequently used by the poets to signify 'the heavens;' as the
mountain of that name in Thessaly, from its extreme height, was
supposed to be the abode of the Gods.]

[Footnote 47: _Prepare the garments._--Ver. 575. Horace tells us
that their clients wove garments for the Roman patricians; and the
females of noble family did the same for their husbands, children,
and brothers. Ovid, in the Fasti, describes Lucretia as making a
'lacerna,' or cloak, for her husband Collatinus. She says to her
hand-maidens, 'With all speed there must be sent to your master a
cloak made with our hands.' (Book ii. l. 746.) Suetonius tells us
that Augustus would wear no clothes but those made by his wife,
sister, or daughter.]

[Footnote 48: _Polluted hands._--Ver. 584. All persons who had
been engaged in the burial of the dead were considered to be
polluted, and were not allowed to enter the temples of the Gods
till they had been purified. Among the Greeks, persons who had
been supposed to have died in foreign countries, and whose funeral
rites had been performed in an honorary manner by their own
relatives, if it turned out that they were not dead, and they
returned to their own country, were considered impure, and were
only purified by being dressed in swaddling clothes, and treated
like new-born infants. We shall, then, be hardly surprised at Juno
considering Halcyone to be polluted by the death of her husband
Ceyx,