ow the poplar groves, and willows pale, of Proserpine:
where Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus and Acheron mingle their waves.
Cocytus is an arm of Styx, the forgetful river. Here dig a pit, and
make it a cubit broad and a cubit long, and pour in milk, and honey,
and wine, and the blood of a ram, and the blood of a black ewe, and
turn away thy face while thou pourest in, and the dead shall come
flocking to taste the milk and the blood: but suffer none to approach
thy offering till thou hast enquired of Tiresias all which thou
wishest to know."

He did as great Circe had appointed. He raised his mast, and hoisted
his white sails, and sat in his ship in peace. The north wind wafted
him through the seas, till he crossed the ocean, and came to the
sacred woods of Proserpine. He stood at the confluence of the three
floods, and digged a pit, as she had given directions, and poured in
his offering; the blood of a ram, and the blood of a black ewe, milk,
and honey, and wine; and the dead came to his banquet: aged men, and
women, and youths, and children who died in infancy. But none of them
would he suffer to approach, and dip their thin lips in the offering,
till Tiresias was served, not though his own mother was among the
number, whom now for the first time he knew to be dead, for he had
left her living when he went to Troy, and she had died since his
departure, and the tidings never reached him: though it irked his soul
to use constraint upon her, yet in compliance with the injunction of
great Circe, he forced her to retire along with the other ghosts. Then
Tiresias, who bore a golden sceptre, came and lapped of the offering,
and immediately he knew Ulysses, and began to prophesy: _he denounced
woe to Ulysses, woe, woe, and many sufferings, through the anger of
Neptune for the putting out of the eye of the sea-god's son. Yet there
was safety after suffering, if they could abstain from slaughtering
the oxen of the Sun after they landed in the Triangular island. For
Ulysses, the gods had destined him from a king to become a beggar, and
to perish by his own guests, unless he slew those who knew him not._

This prophecy, ambiguously delivered, was all that Tiresias was
empowered to unfold, or else there was no longer place for him;
for now the souls of the other dead came flocking in such numbers,
tumultuously demanding the blood, that freezing horror seized the
limbs of the living Ulysses, to see so many, and all dead, and he the
on