But dark night flits round his head with its sorrowful shadows."
Then did his father Anchises proceed, while the tears were up-welling:
"O my begotten, enquire not the exquisite grief of thy kindred :
Him shall the fates just show to the world, and no longer permit him
Here to remain; too mighty to you had the Roman succession
Seemed, ye supernals, if gifts so peculiar had lasted forever.
What lamentations of heroes shall you plain post to the mighty

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City of Mavors! Or, Tiber, what pageants of mourning shalt thou, too,
Witness ere long, as thou close by the new made sepulchre glidest!
No such a youth from the Ilian nation shall ever his Latin
Ancestors lift to so hightened a hope, nor shall ever hereafter
Romulus' land boast over another so cherished a darling!

Ah! for thy piety! Ah! for the pristine faith, and the right hand
Dauntless in war! With impunity none could have dared to attack him,
Meeting him when he was armed, or with infantry charging on foemen,
Or when digging his spurs in the flanks of his lathery war-horse.
Ah! lamentable boy! If ever thou burstest thy hard fate,
Thou shalt become a MARCELLUS! Bring lilies in plentiful handfulls;
I will the flowers purpureal strew, and the soul of mine offspring
Load with the presents at least, and will render if only an empty
'Service!" And so all over the region they ramble together
Out on the broad aërial plains, and investigate all things.

After Anchises has guided his son through the separate objects;
When he has kindled his soul with an ardor for future distinction,
Then he the wars that were yet to be waged to the hero rehearses;
Shows the Laurentian tribes, and the city renowned of the Latins,
Shows in what way to avoid, and in what to encounter each hardship.

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Twain are the portals of slumber; of horn is the one, it is fabled,
Through which is granted an easy departure for genuine spectres :
Bright is the other in lustre, in glistering ivory finished :
But by the latter the ghosts send fanciful visions to heaven.

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Then, when these words had been spoken, Anchises his son and the Sibyl
Follows along, and dismisses them thence through the ivory portals.
Cleaves he his way to the ships, and revisits his waiting companions
Then, by the straight coast bears he away to the port of Cajeta:

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Anchor is cast from the prow, and the sterns stand moored at the sea beach.

BOOK VII.

Embassy sent to Latinus, who offers his daughter in marriage;
Turnus offended, the war is foreshadowed and forces are mustered.

THOU, too, Cajeta, the nurse of Æneas, didst also in dying
Honor eternal bequeath to our shores, and thy memory hovers
Still o'er the place of thy rest, and thy name in Hesperia mighty,
If this glory be aught, yet signals the spot of thy ashes.
But the pious Æneas, her obsequies duly attended,

After composing the mound of her tomb, and after the deep sea's
Surface has calmed, on his voyage sets sail, and abandons the, harbor.
Freshen the breezes at night-fall, nor do the silvery moon-beams
Hinder his courses, as shines 'neath the tremulous shimmer the ocean.
Skirt they along by the neighboring shores of the island of Circé,
Near where the Sun's rich daughter her inaccessible thickets
Makes to resound with the music of ceaseless song, and in splendid
Mansions the odorous cedar enkindles for lights in the night-time,
Running her delicate tissues through with her clattering shuttle.
Hence are distinctly heard the moanings and ravings of lions,
Struggling against their fetters, and roaring till late in the midnight :
Bristly boars, moreover, and bears in their hampering cages
Savagely raging, and figures of great wolves angrily howling,
Whom the unmerciful Circé had changed, by her magic of potent

Herbs, from appearance of men to the visage and haunches of wild beasts.
Lest now the Trojans endure such portentous distortions,

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Should they be borne to her harbor, or land on her ominous sea-beach,
Neptune has kindly inflated their sails with the favoring breezes,

Giving escape, and has wafted them over the turbulant shallows.

Now was the sea with the sunbeams blushing, and forth from profoundest 25

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Æther was saffron Aurora in roseate chariot gleaming,
When have subsided the winds, and has every gale of a sudden
Settled to rest, and the shorn oars labor on motionless marble:
Then just here does Æneas descry from the deep an extensive
Grove. Through the centre of this, in its lovely channel, the Tiber,
Whirling in rapid eddies, and yellow with plenteous quicksand,
Rushes away to the ocean. Around and above it the various
Wild-fowls, wont to desport on its banks and the lap of its current,

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Sweetly were charming the air with their warbles, and thronging the wild-wood.
Bids he his comrades vary their course, and their prows to the mainland
Turn, and elated he enters the river embowered in shadows.

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Come now, Erato, and who where the kings, what the critical issues,

What the condition of primitive Latium was, when the stranger
Host first moored their adventurous fleets on Ausonia's borders,
I will unfold, and recall the uprise of the earliest conflict.
Goddess, instruct thou thy bard: I will tell of the terrible battles
Fought I will tell of the onsets of monarchs in passion on slaughter
Bent; of Tyrrhenian forces and all Hesperia marshalled
Ready in armor. Grander before me the march of achievements :
Grander the work I assume. The monarch Latinus, an old man
Now, was long in tranquility ruling his meadows and peaceable cities.
We from the Laurentine nymph Marica and Faunus descended
Deem him the father of Faunus was Picus, who traces, O Saturn,
Thee as his parent, for thou of his blood art the ultimate author.
Son by the deities' fate he had none, and no masculine offspring
Left; for his son, as he grew, was removed in his earliest childhood:
Only a daughter was keeping his house and his ample dominions,
She now mature for a husband, and fully of age for her bridal.
Many were wooing her out of imperial Latium; many
Out of entire Ausonia: but of them all the superbest

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Wooer was Turnus, from fathers and forefathers strong; and the royal
Consort was yearning with wonderful love as a son to ally him:
But the deities' portents by various terrors oppose it.

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Stood in the midst of his mansions a laurel in deepest seclusion;
Sacred its locks, and protected with awe through many a long year,
Which, it was stated, that father Latinus himself, as discovered
While he was founding his primitive castles, devoted to Phoebus,
And on the colonists from it he settled the name of Laurentes.
Dense on its uppermost summit have bees-a marvel to utter !
Over the vapory æther with buzzing tumultuous wafted,

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Lighted, and there with feet interlacing the one with the other,
Hung of a sudden suspended, a swarm from a foliaged branchlet.
Forthwith a prophet exclaims: "We descern in the omen a foreign
Hero arrive, and a host from the same identical quarters,
Seeking identical quarters, to rule in the heights of the castle!
Further, the maiden Lavinia, too, as she kindled with holy
Torches the fires on the altars, was seen, as she stood at her father's
Side-an unfortunate omen-to catch the fire in her flowing
Tresses, and all of her head-dress seemed to consume in the crackling
Flame, and ablaze were her regal ringlets, ablaze was her princely
Diadem, studded with jewels: then smoking she seemed in a yellow
Glimmer involved, and through all the palace to scatter combustion.
This was reputed a horrible thing, and a marvellous vision;
For they predicted that she would herself be in fame and in fortune
Eminent; but that it boded the people an ominous warfare.

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But by these prodigies anxious, the monarch to Faunus his fate-versed

Father's oracle hies, and consults he the groves that are under
Lofty Albuneä, which, as the grandest of groves, with a sacred
Fountain resounds, and, o'ershaded, exhales a mephitical odor.
Hence the Italian nations, and all the Enotrian mainland

Seek it in doubts for responses: the priest, when he hither hath duly
Brought his oblations, and, down on a pallet of skins of the slaughtered
Sheep, in the silence of midnight, lain and slumbers has courted,
Sees full many a phantom flitting in marvellous manner
Round him, and listens to various voices, and holds with the gods free
Converse, and Acheron's spectres bespeaks in the depths of Avernus.
Here, then, was father Latinus himself, in his quest for responses,
Slaughtering duly a hundred fleece-clad, two-year-old victims,
And, on their pelts and outspread fleeces supported, was lying,
When an oracular voice of a sudden is up from the deep grove
Echoed "Seek not to affiance thy daughter in Latin espousals,
O mine offspring, nor trust to the marital chamber in prospect:
Sons-in-law foreign shall come, who shall lift our renown by their noble

Blood to the stars, and from whose famed stock our descendents shall all things
Under their feet, whatsoever the sun in his rising and setting
Gazes on either ocean, behold readjusted and governed."

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These responses, and warnings of Faunus, his father, in midnight

Silence delivered, Latinus himself shuts not in his own mouth;

But already around through Ausonian cities had Rumor
Fluttering carried it widely, when the Laömedon stalwarts

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Cabled their fleet to the grass-grown mound on the bank of the Tiber.
Meanwhile Æneas, his principal chieftains and comely Iülus,
Under a tall tree's branches, arrange for recruiting their bodies,
Institute banquets, and spelt-wheat short-cakes over the green grass
Thrust 'neath the viands-so Jupiter even himself was directing—
Yea, and they heap on this cereal trencher the fruits of the country.
So when the rest was consumed, as it happened, a lack of provisions
Forced them in hunger to eating the scanty remainder of Ceres,
Aye, and with hands and presumptuous molars the disk of the fateful
Crust to despoil, and to spare not even the quadrated short-cakes:
"Heigh-ho," Iülus exclaims, "We are even consuming our tables!"
Saying no more in derision. That utterance, heard at the outset,

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Signaled the end of their toilings: his sire from the mouth of the speaker
Caught it at once, and, appalled by the deity's oracle, checked him.
Instantly, "Hail," he exclaims, "O land by the destinies due me!
Hail, too, ye guardian home-gods, faithful and trusty of Troja!
This is our home, yea, this is our country! My father Anchises,
Now I distinctly remember, these secrets of destiny left me:
'When,' said he, hunger, my son, shall constrain thee, when wafted to unknown
Shores, to consume thy tables, when viands thereon are exhausted,
Then remember to hope for homes, and though weary to plant there

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Primal abodes with thy hand, and entrench them around with a breastwork.'
This was that hunger, and this was remaining our final endurance,
Destined to set to our hazards a bound:-

Wherefore bestir you, and glad, with the gleam of the earliest sunrise,

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Let us these tracts, and what people inhabit them, where are the nation's

Cities, examine, and search from the harbor in divers directions.
Empty your goblets to Jupiter now, and invoke with entreaties
Father Anchises, and place ye again the wines on the tables."

Thus having spoken, at once with a green-leaved bough he his temples
Wreathes, and alike to the sprite of the place, and to Earth the primeval
Source of the gods, and the nymphs, and the yet unidentified rivers,
Prays; and he then as devoutly on Night, and on nightly uprising
Stars, and Idæän Jove, and in turn on the Phrygian Mother,
Calls, and, in heaven and Erebus dwelling, on each of his parents.
Here the omnipotent father auspiciously thrice from the deep sky
Thundered, and flashing with beamings of light and gold he unfolded,
Floating from æther, a cloud, with his own hand waving the signal.
Hereat a rumor is suddenly spreads through the Trojan batallions,

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That the day has come, when they may found their predestinate ramparts.

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