Æneas, the son of Venus by the Trojan shepherd Anchi’ses, escaped from burning Troy with his aged father, little son, and household gods. He lay concealed for a time in the mountains; and, when the victorious Greeks had all withdrawn, took ship with the remnant of his people to found a new Troy in the west. After seven years of hardships and mistakes, the Trojans embark from Sicily for “the Hesperian shore.” Here the Æneid takes up the story. In the first book we see the Trojan fleet driven by a tempest, sent at Juno’s solicitation, on the opposite coast of Africa, near the rising walls of Carthage. Dido, its queen, whom the murder of her husband Sichæus by her unnatural brother had driven from Tyre, receives the strangers hospitably, and by the strategy of Venus conceives a passionate love for Æneas. At her request the Trojan prince tells the pathetic story—the fall of his native city through the wiles of the Greeks, and his subsequent trials. Æneas returns Dido’s love, but only at last to betray his confiding hostess, and fly with his vessels under cover of the night, in obedience to a warning from Mercury, the messenger of Jove. Too “pious” to disregard the heavenly command, he left Dido to end her sorrow on the funeral pyre. After a temporary sojourn in Sicily, where he celebrates funeral games to his father’s memory, Æneas at length reaches Cumæ in Italy, and at once seeks the Sibyl. She informs him that his trials are not over, and takes him to the lower world that he may hold an interview with his father Anchises. There he descries among other shades the injured Dido, to whom he endeavors to excuse his conduct. “’Mid these among the branching treen Sad Dido moved, the Tyrian queen, Her death-wound ghastly yet and green. Soon as Æneas caught the view And through the mist her semblance knew, Like one who spies, or thinks he spies, Through flickering clouds the new moon rise, The tear-drop from his eyelids broke, And thus in tenderest tones he spoke. ‘Ah Dido! rightly then I read The news that told me you were dead, Slain by your own rash hand! Myself the cause of your despair! Now by the blessed stars I swear, By heaven, by all that dead men keep In reverence here ’mid darkness deep, Against my will, ill-fated fair, I parted from your land.’” CONINGTON. But Dido averts her eyes “that neither smiled nor wept,” and moves away in silence to join Sichæus, who “gives her love for love.” Æneas learns from the lips of Anchises the future of his race, and beholds the shadowy forms of kings, generals, and statesmen that are to shed glory on the Roman name. “Augustus Cæsar, god by birth,” figures, as we should expect, the proudest of the throng. At last he espies the great Marcellus, “the Sword of Rome,” glittering in the spoils of the Punic War; and by his side