Lo, in the first of Orcus' jaws, close to the doorway side, The Sorrows and Avenging Griefs have set their beds to bide; There the pale kin of Sickness dwells, and Eld, the woeful thing, And Fear, and squalid-fashioned Lack, and witless Hungering, Shapes terrible to see with eye; and Toil of Men, and Death, And Sleep, Death's brother, and the Lust of Soul that sickeneth: And War, the death-bearer, was set full in the threshold's way, And those Well-willers' iron beds: there heartless Discord lay, 280 Whose viper-breeding hair about was bloody-filleted. But in the midst a mighty elm, dusk as the night, outspread Its immemorial boughs and limbs, where lying dreams there lurk, As tells the tale, still clinging close 'neath every leaf-side mirk. Withal most wondrous, many-shaped are all the wood-beasts there; The Centaurs stable by the porch, and twi-shaped Scyllas fare, And hundred-folded Briareus, and Lerna's Worm of dread Fell hissing; and Chimæra's length and fire-behelmèd head, Gorgons and Harpies, and the shape of that three-bodied Shade. Then smitten by a sudden fear Æneas caught his blade, 290 And turned the naked point and edge against their drawing nigh; And but for her wise word that these were thin lives flitting by All bodiless, and wrapped about in hollow shape and vain, With idle sword had he set on to cleave the ghosts atwain. To Acheron of Tartarus from hence the road doth go, That mire-bemingled, whirling wild, rolls on his desert flow, And all amid Cocytus' flood casteth his world of sand. This flood and river's ferrying doth Charon take in hand, Dread in his squalor: on his chin untrimmed the hoar hair lies Most plenteous; and unchanging flame bides in his staring eyes: 300 Down from his shoulders hangs his gear in filthy knot upknit; And he himself poles on his ship, and tends the sails of it, And crawls with load of bodies lost in bark all iron-grey, Grown old by now: but fresh and green is godhead's latter day. Down thither rushed a mighty crowd, unto the flood-side borne; Mothers and men, and bodies there with all the life outworn Of great-souled heroes; many a boy and never-wedded maid, And youths before their fathers' eyes upon the death-bale laid: As many as the leaves fall down in first of autumn cold; As many as the gathered fowl press on to field and fold, 310 From off the weltering ocean-flood, when the late year and chill Hath driven them across the sea the sunny lands to fill. There stood the first and prayed him hard to waft their bodies o'er, With hands stretched out for utter love of that far-lying shore. But that grim sailor now takes these, now those from out the band, While all the others far away he thrusteth from the sand.