To speed our course, and waft us o’er the floods:

So shall a barren heifer from the stall

Beneath the knife upon your altars fall;

So in our palace, at our safe return,

Rich with unnumber’d gifts the pile shall burn;

So shall a ram, the largest of the breed,

Black as these regions, to Tiresias bleed.


“Thus solemn rites and holy vows we paid

To all the phantom-nations of the dead;

Then died the sheep: a purple torrent flow’d,

And all the caverns smoked with streaming blood.

When lo! appear’d along the dusky coasts,

Thin, airy shoals of visionary ghosts:

Fair, pensive youths, and soft enamour’d maids;

And wither’d elders, pale and wrinkled shades;

Ghastly with wounds the forms of warriors slain

Stalk’d with majestic port, a martial train:

These and a thousand more swarm’d o’er the ground,

And all the dire assembly shriek’d around.

Astonish’d at the sight, aghast I stood,

And a cold fear ran shivering through my blood;

Straight I command the sacrifice to haste,

Straight the flay’d victims to the flames are cast,

And mutter’d vows, and mystic song applied

To grisly Pluto, and his gloomy bride.


“Now swift I waved my falchion o’er the blood;

Back started the pale throngs, and trembling stood,

Round the black trench the gore untasted flows,

Till awful from the shades Tiresias rose.


“There wandering through the gloom I first survey’d,

New to the realms of death, Elpenor’s shade:

His cold remains all naked to the sky

On distant shores unwept, unburied lie.

Sad at the sight I stand, deep fix’d in woe,

And ere I spoke the tears began to flow.


“‘O say what angry power Elpenor led

To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?

How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoin’d,

Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?


“The ghost replied: ‘To hell my doom I owe,

Demons accursed, dire ministers of woe!

My feet, through wine unfaithful to their weight,