But Æneas is troubled at heart. May not this mad instinct of the women be right, after all? Were it not better to rest here in Sicily, than wander on again over the weary ocean in quest of this Western Land? He takes counsel with the Nestor of the fleet--the aged Nautes--to whom the goddess of wisdom has given an understanding spirit beyond his fellows. The old seaman’s motto is one of the poet’s noblest utterances[30]-- “Whate’er betides, he only cures The stroke of fortune who endures.” He bids his chief take counsel, too, with Acestes. In the visions of the night the shade of his father Anchises once more appears to him, and gives the same advice as Nautes. It is settled that the women and the old men, and all that are weary and faint-hearted, shall be left behind in Sicily, while the picked band of good men and true sail on with their leader into the west; thus their reduced number of ships will yet suffice them.[31] The damaged galleys are hastily repaired, and the foundations of a new town are marked out for the Trojan settlers: it is to be called Acesta, in honour of their kind host. The parting of the wanderers from their friends is a fine passage, finely rendered:-- “With kindliness of gentle speech The good Æneas comforts each, And to their kinsman prince commends With tears his subjects and his friends. Three calves to Eryx next he kills; A lambkin’s blood to Tempest spills, And bids them loose from land: With olive-leaves he binds his brow, Then takes his station on the prow, A charger in his hand, Flings out the entrails on the brine, And pours a sacred stream of wine. Fair winds escort them o’er the deep: With emulous stroke the waves they sweep.” CHAPTER VI. THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES. The Sea-god, at Venus’s intercession for her son, sends Æneas and his crews calm seas and prosperous gales. One victim only the Fates demand; Palinurus, the pilot of Æneas’s ship, gives way to sleep during the quiet watches of the night, slips overboard, and is lost. The poet has clothed the whole story in a transparent mythological allegory, and which must have been intended to be transparent. Sleep is personified; Palinurus resists his first temptations; but the god waves over his eyes a bough steeped in dews of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and the unhappy steersman can hold out no longer. The accident happens near the shore of the twin Sirens, of whose seductions Homer has told us in the wanderings of Ulysses:-- “A perilous neighbourhood of yore And white with mounded bones, Where the hoarse sea with far-heard roar Keeps washing o’er the stones.”