serpent-tailed dog, lay on guard, friendly to the spirits entering, but inimical to those who would depart. The palace itself is dark and gloomy,

set in the midst of uncanny fields haunted by strange apparitions. The groves of somber trees about the palace, the meads of Asphodel, barren or, at best, studded with futile bushes and paleflowered weeds, where wander the shades, and the woods along the waste shore "of tall poplars and willows

TO CHARON

that shed their fruit before the season" are, without any particular discrimination, celebrated by the poets as the Garden of Proserpine.

Here life has death for neighbor,

And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labor,

Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
And no such things grow here.

No growth of moor or coppice,
No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies,
Green grapes of Proserpine,
Pale beds of blowing rushes,
Where no leaf blooms or blushes
Save this whereout she crushes

For dead men deadly wine.

Pale, beyond porch and portal,

Crowned with calm leaves, she stands

45. Tartarus and the Elysian Fields. With the ghosts of Hades the living might but rarely communicate, and only through certain oracles of the dead, situate by cavernous spots and sheer abysms, deep and melancholy streams, and baleful marshes. These naturally seemed to afford access to the world below, which with the later poets, such as Vergil, comes to be regarded as under the ground. One of these descents to the Underworld was near Tænarum in Laconia; another, near Cumæ in Italy, was Lake Avernus, so foul in its exhalations that, as its name portends, no bird could fly across it. Before the judges of the lower world, Minos, Æacus, and Rhadamanthus, the souls of the dead were brought to trial.) The condemned were assigned to regions where all manner of torment awaited them at the hands of monsters dire, the fiftyheaded Hydra and the avenging Furies. Some evildoers, such as the Titans of old, were doomed to languish in the gulf of Tartarus immeasurably below. But the souls of the guiltless passed to the Elysian Fields, where each followed the chosen pursuit of

FIG. 37. A FURY

his former life in a land of spring, sunlight, happiness, and song. And by the Fields there flowed the river Lethe, from which the souls of those that were to return to the earth in other bodies drank oblivion of their former lives.

46. The Islands of the Blest. Homer mentions, elsewhere, an Elysium of the western seas, which is a happy land, "where life is easiest for men: no snow is there, nor yet great storm, nor any rain; but always ocean sendeth forth the breeze of the shrill West to blow cool on men."2 Hither favored heroes pass without dying, and live under the happy rule of Rhadamanthus. The Elysium of Hesiod and Pindar is likewise in the Western Ocean, 2 Odyssey, 4, 561.

1 Æneid, 6.

on the Islands of the Blessed, the Fortunate Isles. From this dream of a western Elysium may have sprung the legend of the island Atlantis. That blissful region may have been wholly imaginary. It is, however, not impossible that the myth had its origin in the reports of storm-driven mariners who had caught a glimpse of occidental lands. In these Islands of the Blest, the Titans, released from Tartarus after many years, dwelt under the golden sway of the white-haired Cronus.1

47. Pluto (Hades) was brother of Jupiter. To him fell the sovereignty of the lower world and the shades of the dead. In his character of Hades, the viewless, he is hard and inexorable.

1 Hes. Works and Days, 169.

2 From The Fortunate Islands, by Andrew Lang.