fleeting moments, and died of joy in his arms,[1] we find the treacherous Eriphyle, who, for the bribe of a golden necklace, persuaded her husband Amphiarus to go to his predestined death in the same war, and even such disgraces to their sex as were Phædra and Pasiphae. In these Mourning Fields Æneas meets one whom he would, it may be conceived, have very gladly avoided. Half veiled in mist, seen dimly like the moon through a cloud, Dido stands before him there: and thus, for the first time, he is made certain of her death, Æneas is ready with regrets, and even tears.
"She on the ground averted kept
Hard eyes that neither smiled nor wept;
Nor bated more of her stern mood,
Than if a monument she stood."
At last, without a word, she turns from her false lover, and seeks in the dim groves the society of her dead husband Sichæus.
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"Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes reappears;
Round the dear shade she would have clung—'tis vain,
The hours are past—too brief, had they been years;
And him no mortal effort can detain:
Swift, toward the realms that know not earthly day,
He through the portal takes his silent way,
And on the palace-floor a lifeless corse she lay."By no weak pity might the gods be moved;
She who thus perished, not without the crime
Of lovers that in Reason's spite have loved,
Was doomed to wear out her appointed time,
Apart from happy ghosts that gather flowers
Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers."—Wordsworth's 'Laodamia.
