any indication of the blessings reserved for the pious and the good. No green fields gladden our eyes. No blooming bowers diffuse their odours. No celestial melodies regale us from golden harps. The whole region appears disconsolate and dreary; and the most distinguished and renowned of the ghosts which had conversed with Ulysses, displayed sufficient evidences of discontent and sorrow. Tiresias easily preferred" the realms of cheerful day, to the "dark and unpleasant lands of the Shades." Agamemnon wails and weeps with pitiable imbecility. Ajax is still the victim of the wrath in which he expired, and is silent, sad, implacable, and sulky. Achilles, who is described as maintaining high control over the dead, candidly avows that he had rather exist in poverty and dependence on earth, than hold a sovereign and undisputed empire over the regions of the dead. And Hercules himself, though prepared to enjoy the pleasures most congenial to his earthly habits, holding his bow uncased, and his arrow ready for the string, and girt with the belt on which were broidered combats, and homicides, and beasts of prey, appeared not less gloomy and disconsolate than the most unhappy of the ghosts who pined around him for the terrestrial enjoyments they had lost. Most of these illustrious shades were communicative and loquacious, but they never adverted to the equity of their lot, to the beauty of the scenes in which they abode, or to the joys which awaited the Manes of the just. Even the Bard who created the scene, seems to have been as little anxious to decorate, as they were to extol it. By one expression alone does he intimate that the region was not wholly barren and unlovely; and that fancy, so rich and exuberant in the embellishment of other objects, has solely scattered over the valleys of the blessed the yellow flowers of the grave-loving Asphodel *. Yet we are told of the judge of the dead, and of his immutable justice; and we behold innumerable ghosts awed by the authority of his golden sceptre, crowding into the hall of his palace, and preparing to plead their cause before his high and equitable tribunal. If, however, the blessings of Elysium were parsimoniously conferred, the punishments of Tartarus were sometimes decreed with rigid and unpitying equity. Though guilt might not have uniformly experienced the retribution which it had merited †, numerous examples were exhibited of the inflexible judgment of the council of Minos. The gigantic Tityus, the mocked and miserable Tantalus, the unhappy Sysiphus with his interminable labours, displayed, in their sufferings, the authority and the justice of the tribunal of hell. Yet, in the punishments so decreed, there is much that is inconsistent and absurd. The ghost, without bone or flesh, as the poet tells us, is yet supplied for the purposes of retribution, with the form and feelings of corporeal being; • Kar' aσpodinov ara. Meads of Asphodel. Homer, I believe, has but once used the term Elysium. In the fourth book of the Odyssey, Menelaus is informed by Proteus, that he was not destined to finish his days at Argos, for the gods should send him to Elysium at the extremity of the earth, where the yellow haired Rhadamanthus exercised supreme authority, and the inhabitants were gifted with immortal felicity. "No snows are there, no driving showers, and no stormy winter; but soft gales, perpetually blowing from the ocean, cool and purify the air and refresh the land." + The crimes of Jocasta, of Phædra, and of Eryphile, are enumerated; but Homer affords no ground to believe that they were condemned or punished by the infernal tribunal. and he hungers, and thirsts, and toils, and is extended over nine acres of ground, and is exposed to birds of prey, which feast upon his liver, and scoop his entrails. The bard had limited the pleasures of the acquitted dead to sensual enjoyment, and, in the same manner, the sufferings of the guilty were to be those only of sense. We hear, we see, nothing of a spiritual and intellectual character; and the whole scene, almost too fabulous for fiction, can scarcely be said to surpass the hell of the savage, whose hopes and fears are circumscribed within the narrow circle of bodily sensations. The Elysium, then, and the Tartarus of Homer, are frail and feeble fancies, scarcely plausible enough to deceive the credulity of the most credulous Pagan. To the upright, the first authenticates none of those sublime and elevating expectations of future recompence, which might animate them in the fulfilment of duty, or console them in the sufferings of sorrow. For them death is to be succeeded but by a reiteration of low, and languid, and limited enjoyments; and they are to bring with them to their final abode, the wretched passions by which they had been agitated in life, and the melancholy recollections which are perpetually to remind them of the pleasures that are past. In delineating the retributive terrors of Tartarus, the poet may have exercised a sounder justice. Such terrors might have carried dismay to timid and superstitious guilt; and crime might have been proportionally alarmed and repressed. But the creed of retribution was, at best, the frail work of idle reverie, and undisciplined fancy. Sometimes unjust, and sometimes ludicrous and repulsive, in its dogmas of punishment, it was scarcely or imperfectly to influence the more wise and reflecting classes 421 of men; and, however it might have been received by ages of barbarism, always more ready to embrace impossibility and falsehood, than probability and truth, it was to be exposed, in a more thinking and speculative period, to the contemptuous scoff of philosophic mockery, and to the doubt or rejection of reason and common sense. II. The great poet of Italy opens a more vivid and interesting view of the infernal regions. He mingles philosophy with fancy. Sublime horrors, and beautiful visions, are blended in the fable of his magnificent dream; and the forms which issue so distinctly from his pencil, admirably and consistently people the scenes of softness or sadness in which his imagination delights to expatiate. The poet commences his work of creation in the very vestibule of his infernal world. Innumerable tribes of shadowy beings are there exhibited in all the diversity of their occupations or sorrows. Some flit restlessly and unceasingly in the glooms above, some mope and wander in mists and darkness below, some press forward with impatience to pass the impure and loathsome flood. The shades of the unburied dead, men, and matrons, and short lived youths, and unmarried girls, as numerous as the leaves which the winds of Autumn strew upon the earth, stretch out their hands to the heedless and squalid Charon, and supplicate admission into his boat *. With this multitude mingle the hideous * Huc omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebat; Æneid. lib. vi. 1. 305. Ib. 325. forms of discord, and war, and death, and the sad tribes of grief, care, disease and toil; and this vast and ghastly population is augmented by Gorgens, and Harpies, and Centaurs, and Hydras, of various and fearful aspect, and by the bi-formed Scylla, the hundred handed Briareus, and the more dreadful prodigy of the flame-breathing Chimæra*. On the further banks of the Styx spread out the regions allotted for the sojourn of infants who had been hurried by an early destiny to the tomb †; of those who had perished by their own hands or by the injustice of their judge; of lovers who were yet pursued by the cares and sorrows which they had experienced on earth; and of warriors still occupied by their chariots and their arms, and still marked and deformed by the ghastly wounds which they had received in their former conflicts . Two passages are opened from hence, one issuing into the realms of Tartarus, the other into the plains of Elysium. The realms of Tartarus are defended by a triple wall, and surrounded by the flaming deluge of Phle * Centauri in foribus stabulant, Scyllæque biformes, + Continuò audita voces, vagitus et ingens, Hos juxta, falso damnati crimine mortis- Hic quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit- Ib. 426. Ib. 430, 434, 484, &c. |