The Furies couch in iron cells,
And Discord maddens and rebels;
Her snake-locks hiss, her wreaths drip gore.
"Full in the midst an aged elm
Broods darkly o'er the shadowy realm:
There dream-land phantoms rest the wing,
Men say, and 'neath its foliage cling.
And many monstrous shapes beside
Within the infernal gates abide;
There Centaurs, Scyllas, fish and maid,
There Briareus' hundred-handed shade,
Chimæra armed with flame,
Gorgons and Harpies make their den,
With the foul pest of Lerna's fen,
And Geryon's triple frame."
Then they come in sight of the rivers of Hell—Acheron, Cocytus, and Styx. The relative physical geography is somewhat confused by the poet, but it is the Styx on which the Ferryman of the Shades, the surly Charon,—
"Grim, squalid, foul, with aspect dire,
His eyeballs each a globe of fire,"—
plies his office of transporting the dead, performing the duties which Homer assigns to Mercury. But it is not all who even in death are allowed to pass the gloomy river. Only those who have received all due rites of burial can claim to enter the final abode of spirits at once; those unhappy ones who from any cause lie unburied have to wander, moaning and shivering, on the other side, for a space of a hundred years. So the Sibyl explains to Æneas, when he marks with surprise
