XXXVIII. Before the threshold, in the jaws of Hell, Grief spreads her pillow, with remorseful Care. There sad Old Age and pale Diseases dwell, And misconceiving Famine, Want and Fear, Terrific shapes, and Death and Toil appear. Death's kinsman, Sleep, and Joys of sinful kind, And deadly War crouch opposite, and here The Furies' iron chamber, Discord blind And Strife, her viperous locks with gory fillets twined. XXXIX. High in the midst a giant elm doth fling The shadows of its aged arms. There dwell False Dreams and, nestling, to the foliage cling, And monstrous shapes, too numerous to tell, Keep covert, stabled in the porch of Hell. The beast of Lerna, hissing in his ire, Huge Centaurs, two-formed Scyllas, fierce and fell, Briareus hundred-handed, Gorgons dire, Harpies, the triple Shade, Chimaera fenced with fire. XL. At once AEneas, stirred by sudden fear, Clutches his sword, and points the naked blade To affront them. Then, but that the Heaven-taught seer Warned him that each was but an empty shade, A shapeless soul, vain onset he had made, And slashed the shadows. So he checked his hand, And past the gateway in the gloom they strayed Through Tartarus to Acheron's dark strand, Where thick the whirlpool boils, and voids the seething sand XLI. Into the deep Cocytus. Charon there, Grim ferryman, stands sentry. Mean his guise, His chin a wilderness of hoary hair, And like a flaming furnace stare his eyes. Hung in a loop around his shoulders lies A filthy gaberdine. He trims the sail, And, pole in hand, across the water plies His steel-grey shallop with the corpses pale, Old, but a god's old age has left him green and hale. XLII. There shoreward rushed a multitude, the shades Of noble heroes, numbered with the dead, Boys, husbands, mothers and unwedded maids, Sons on the pile before their parents spread, As leaves in number, which the trees have shed When Autumn's frosts begin to chill the air, Or birds, that from the wintry blasts have fled And over seas to sunnier shores repair. So thick the foremost stand, and, stretching hands of prayer, XLIII. Plead for a passage. Now the boatman stern Takes these, now those, then thrusts the rest away, And vainly for the distant bank they yearn. Then spake AEneas, for with strange dismay He viewed the tumult, "Prithee, maiden, say What means this thronging to the river-side? What seek the souls? Why separate, do they Turn back, while others sweep the leaden tide? Who parts the shades, what doom the difference can decide?"