There is a cave Within the mount of God, fast by his throne, Where light and darkness in perpetual round Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through heaven Grateful vicissitude, like day and night: Light issues forth, and at the other door Obsequious darkness enters, till her hour To veil the heaven. [219] _Sleep, Death’s half brother._] Virg. Æn. vi. 278: Here Toils and Death, and Death’s half-brother Sleep, Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep. DRYDEN. [220] _Nor them the shining Sun_ _E’er with his beam contemplates._] Odyssey, xi. 14: With clouds and darkness veil’d: on whom the Sun Deigns not to look with his beam-darting eye: Or when he climbs the starry arch, or when Earthward he slopes again his westering wheels. COWPER. [221] _To immortal gods_ _A foe._] Probably from his destroying the human favourites of the gods, and the sons of the goddesses who have descended to mortal amours: as in the instances of Hyacinthus, the favourite of Apollo; and Memnon, the son of Aurora; whose death and burial are described with such romantic fancy in Quintus Calaber, Post-Homerics, or Supplemental Iliad. [222] _And stern Prosérpina._] Many of the temples of Ceres were dedicated to the deity under the name of Persephone or Proserpine, who was supposed her daughter; but they were in reality the same personage. Persephone was styled Cora; which the Greeks misinterpreted the virgin or damsel. This was the same as Cura, a feminine title of the Sun; by which Ceres also was called at Cnidos. However mild and gentle Proserpine may have been represented in her virgin state by the poets, yet her tribunal seems in many places to have been very formidable. In consequence of this we find her, with Minos and Rhadamanthus, condemned to the shades below as an infernal inquisitor. Nonnus says, “Proserpine armed the Furies:” the notion of which Furies arose from the cruelties practised in the Prutaneia, or fire-temples. They were originally only priests of fire; but were at last ranked among the hellish tormentors. Herodotus speaks of a Prutaneion in Achaia Pthiotic, of which he gives a fearful account. No person, he says, ever entered the precincts, that returned: whatever person strayed that way was immediately seized upon by the priests and sacrificed. BRYANT. [223] _With arch’d roofs_ _Of loftiest rock o’erhung._] Not far from the ruins (of Nonacrum, a town of Arcadia,) is a lofty cliff: I have seen none that ascended to such a height. A stream distils from the declivity. This water is denominated Styx by the Greeks. It is deadly to man and to all animals whatever. PAUSANIAS, _Arcadics_, b. viii.