"These rites, these altars, and this feast, O king, From no vain fears or superstition spring, Or blind devotion, or from blinder chance, Or heady zeal, or brutal ignorance: But, saved from danger, with a grateful sense, The labours of a god we recompense. See, from afar, yon rock that mates the sky, About whose feet such heaps of rubbish lie; Such indigested ruin; bleak and bare, How desert now it stands, exposed in air! 'Twas once a robber's den, inclosed around With living stone, and deep beneath the ground, The monster Cacus, more than half a beast, This hold, impervious to the sun, possessed. The pavement ever foul with human gore; Heads, and their mangled members, hung the door. Vulcan this plague begot; and, like his sire, Black clouds he belched, and flakes of livid fire. Time, long expected, eased us of our load, And brought the needful presence of a god. The avenging force of Hercules, from Spain, } Arrived in triumph, from Geryon slain:-- } Thrice lived the giant, and thrice lived in vain. } His prize, the lowing herds, Alcides drove Near Tyber's banks, to graze the shady grove. Allured with hope of plunder, and intent By force to rob, by fraud to circumvent, The brutal Cacus, as by chance they strayed, Four oxen thence, and four fair kine, conveyed. And, lest the printed footsteps might be seen, He dragged them backwards to his rocky den. The tracks averse a lying notice gave, And led the searcher backward from the cave. Meantime the herdsman hero shifts his place, To find fresh pasture and untrodden grass. The beasts, who missed their mates, filled all around With bellowings, and the rocks restored the sound. One heifer, who had heard her love complain, Roared from the cave, and made the project vain. Alcides found the fraud; with rage he shook, And tossed about his head his knotted oak. Swift as the winds, or Scythian arrows' flight, He clomb, with eager haste, the aërial height. Then first we saw the monster mend his pace; Fear in his eyes, and paleness in his face, Confessed the god's approach. Trembling he springs, As terror had increased his feet with wings; Nor stayed for stairs; but down the depth he threw His body, on his back the door he drew: (The door, a rib of living rock; with pains His father hewed it out, and bound with iron chains,) He broke the heavy links, the mountain closed, And bars and levers to his foe opposed. The wretch had hardly made his dungeon fast; The fierce avenger came with bounding haste; Surveyed the mouth of the forbidden hold, And here and there his raging eyes he rolled. He gnashed his teeth; and thrice he compassed round With winged speed the circuit of the ground. Thrice at the cavern's mouth he pulled in vain,