But Euryclea, with dispatchful care, And sage Eurynome, the couch prepare; Instant they bid the blazing torch display Around the dome and artificial day; Then to repose her steps the matron bends, And to the queen Eurynome descends; A torch she bears, to light with guiding fires The royal pair; she guides them, and retires The instant his fair spouse Ulysses led To the chaste love-rites of the nuptial bed. And now the blooming youths and sprightly fair Cease the gay dance, and to their rest repair; But in discourse the king and consort lay, While the soft hours stole unperceived away; Intent he hears Penelope disclose A mournful story of domestic woes, His servants’ insults, his invaded bed, How his whole flocks and herds exhausted bled, His generous wines dishonour’d shed in vain, And the wild riots of the suitor-train. The king alternate a dire tale relates, Of wars, of triumphs, and disastrous fates; All he unfolds; his listening spouse turns pale With pleasing horror at the dreadful tale; Sleepless devours each word; and hears how slain Cicons on Cicons swell the ensanguined plain; How to the land of Lote unbless’d he sails; And images the rills and flowery vales! How dash’d like dogs, his friends the Cyclops tore (Not unrevenged), and quaff’d the spouting gore; How the loud storms in prison bound, he sails From friendly Aeolus with prosperous gales: Yet fate withstands! a sudden tempest roars, And whirls him groaning from his native shores: How on the barbarous Laestrigonian coast, By savage hands his fleet and friends lie lost; How scarce himself survived: he paints the bower, The spells of Circe, and her magic power; His dreadful journey to the realms beneath, To seek Tiresias in the vales of death; How in the doleful mansions lie survey’d His royal mother, pale Anticlea’s shade; And friends in battle slain, heroic ghosts! Then how, unharm’d, he pass’d the Syren-coasts, The justling rocks where fierce Charybdis raves, And howling Scylla whirls her thunderous waves, The cave of death! How his companions slay The oxen sacred to the god of day. Till Jove in wrath the rattling tempest guides, And whelms the offenders in the roaring tides: How struggling through the surge he reach’d the shores Of fair Ogygia and Calypso’s bowers; Where the gay blooming nymph constrain’d his stay, With sweet, reluctant, amorous delay; And promised, vainly promised, to bestow Immortal life, exempt from age and woe: How saved from storms Phæacia’s coast he trod, By great Alcinous honour’d as a god, Who gave him last his country to behold, With change of raiment, brass, and heaps of gold He ended, sinking into sleep, and shares A sweet forgetfulness of all his cares. Soon as soft slumber eased the toils of day, Minerva rushes through the aërial way, And bids Aurora with her golden wheels Flame from the ocean o’er the eastern hills; Uprose Ulysses from the genial bed, And thus with thought mature the monarch said: