The veil of Acheron is rent in twain;
His phantom precincts vanish. Ne'er again
Can Earth conceal the secret:—it is ours;
And all that once was hidden is made plain.
Hail, mighty Master, hail! The world was thine,
For thou hadst read her riddle line by line,
Scroll upon scroll; and now ... oh, ecstasy
Of awe and rapture,... thou hast made her mine.
D.A. Slater.
I give a part of this piece in the version of Dryden, beginning from Cerberus et furiae. 'I am not dissatisfied', says Dryden, 'upon the review of anything I have done in this author.'
AS for the Dog, the Furies and their Snakes,
The gloomy Caverns and the burning Lakes,
And all the vain infernal trumpery,
They neither are, nor were, nor e'er can be.
But here on earth the guilty have in view
The mighty pains to mighty mischiefs due,
Racks, prisons, poisons, the Tarpeian Rock,
Stripes, hangmen, pitch and suffocating smoke,
And, last and most, if these were cast behind,
The avenging horror of a conscious mind,
Whose deadly fear anticipates the blow,
And sees no end of punishment and woe,
But looks for more at the last gasp of breath.
This makes a hell on earth, and life a death.
Meantime, when thoughts of death disturb thy head,
Consider: Ancus great and good is dead;
Ancus, thy better far, was born to die,
And thou, dost thou bewail mortality?
So many monarchs, with their mighty state
Who ruled the world, were over-ruled by Fate.
That haughty King who lorded o'er the main,
And whose stupendous bridge did the wild waves restrain—
In vain they foamed, in vain they threatened wrack,
While his proud legions marched upon their back,—
Him Death, a greater monarch, overcame,
Nor spared his guards the more for their Immortal name.
The Roman chief, the Carthaginian's dread,
Scipio, the Thunder Bolt of War, is dead,
And like a common slave by Fate in triumph led.
The founders of invented arts are lost,
And wits who made eternity their boast.
Where now is Homer, who possessed the throne?
The immortal work remains, the mortal author's gone.
Dryden.
DIANA guardeth our estate,
Girls and boys immaculate;
Boys and maidens pure of stain,
Be Diana our refrain.