Her passion feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sychæus seems to revive in and blend with this new affection.[9] Her very queenliness delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero before whom she falls "one of the race of the gods." For a while the figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate passion. The rumours of war from the jealous chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers round her hero with sweet observances of love, she hangs at his side the jewelled sword and the robe of Tyrian purple woven by her queenly hands. But even in the happiest moments of his story the consummate art of the poet has prepared for the final catastrophe. Little words, like "misera," "infelix," "fati nescia," sound the first undertones of a woe to come, even amidst the joy of the first meeting or the glad tumult of the hunting-scene. The restlessness, the quick alternations of feeling in the hour of Dido's triumph, prepare us for the wild swaying of the soul from bitterest hate to pitiful affection in the hour of her agony. She is the first in the sensitiveness of her passion to catch the change in Æneas, and the storm of her indignation sweeps away the excuses of her lover, as the storm of her love had swept away his earlier resolve. All dignity, all queenliness breaks before the "fury of a woman scorned." She dashes herself against the rooted purpose of Æneas as the storm-winds, to use Vergil's image, dash themselves from this quarter and that against the rooted oak. The madness of her failure drives her through the streets like a Mænad in the nightly orgies of Cithæron; she flies at last to her chamber like a beast at bay, and gazes out distracted at the Trojan shipmen putting off busily from the shores. Yet ever and again the wild frenzy-bursts are broken by notes of the old 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 Æneas 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 Æneas 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 Æneas 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."