ly one alive in that region. Now his mother came and lapped the
blood, without restraint from her son, and now she knew him to be her
son, and enquired of him why he had come alive to their comfortless
habitations. And she said, that affliction for Ulysses's long absence
had preyed upon her spirits, and brought her to the grave.

Ulysses's soul melted at her moving narration, and forgetting the
state of the dead, and that the airy texture of disembodied spirits
does not admit of the embraces of flesh and blood, he threw his arms
about her to clasp her: the poor ghost melted from his embrace, and
looking mournfully upon him vanished away.

Then saw he other females.--Tyro, who when she lived was the paramour
of Neptune, and by him had Pelias, and Neleus. Antiope, who bore
two like sons to Jove, Amphion and Zethus, founders of Thebes.
Alcmena, the mother of Hercules, with her fair daughter, afterwards
her daughter-in-law, Megara. There also Ulysses saw Jocasta, the
unfortunate mother and wife of Oedipus; who ignorant of kin wedded
with her son, and when she had discovered the unnatural alliance, for
shame and grief hanged herself. He continued to drag a wretched life
above the earth, haunted by the dreadful Furies.--There was Leda,
the wife of Tyndarus, the mother of the beautiful Helen, and of the
two brave brothers, Castor and Pollux, who obtained this grace from
Jove, that being dead, they should enjoy life alternately, living
in pleasant places under the earth. For Pollux had prayed that his
brother Castor, who was subject to death, as the son of Tyndarus,
should partake of his own immortality, which he derived from an
immortal sire: this the Fates denied; therefore Pollux was permitted
to divide his immortality with his brother Castor, dying and living
alternately.--There was Iphimedeia, who bore two sons to Neptune
that were giants, Otus and Ephialtes: Earth in her prodigality
never nourished bodies to such portentous size and beauty as these
two children were of, except Orion. At nine years old they had
imaginations of climbing to Heaven to see what the gods were doing;
they thought to make stairs of mountains, and were for piling Ossa
upon Olympus, and setting Pelion upon that, and had perhaps performed
it, if they had lived till they were striplings; but they were cut off
by death in the infancy of their ambitious project.--Phaedra was there,
and Procris, and Ariadne, mournful for Theseus's desertion, and Maera,