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"Our God, he is alive, and in his hall of heaven he goes on existing away, throughout all the eternities. "Our God, too, is a God in robust health, no myth, pale and thin as sacrificial wafers, or as shadows by Cocytus. "Our God is strong. In his hand he upholds sun, moon, and stars; thrones break, nations reel to and fro, when he knits his forehead.
Wherever Egyptian, or indeed Grecian colonies migrated, nothing was more natural than that, where they found a coincidence of scene, they should establish a coincidence of name. In Epirus were also the Acheron and Cocytus; and Campania contains the whole topography of the Virgilian Hades. See sect. xxi., p. 77.
And the water of this river too mingles with no other, but flows round in a circle and falls into Tartarus over against Pyriphlegethon; and the name of the river, as the poets say, is Cocytus.
The margins of Cocytus doubtless knew them: mine were dedicated to the more attractive flesh and blood of animal life, the varied phases of the tropic forest. Or, in more practical mood, I would stoop to render certain facts recorded in the text. To these digressions I probably owe what little education I possess.
"But if I was not very happy in the height of my enjoyment, so I afterwards became perfectly miserable; being soon overtaken by disease, and reduced to distress, till at length, with a broken constitution and broken heart, I ended my wretched days in a jail: nor can I think the sentence of Minos too mild, who condemned me, after having taken a large dose of avarice, to wander three years on the banks of Cocytus, with the knowledge of having spent the fortune in the person of the grandson which I had raised in that of the grandfather.
O'er the sad threshold, where the cypress bough Supplants the rose that should adorn thy home, On the last pilgrimage on earth that now Awaits thee, wanderer to Cocytus, come! Darkly we woo, and weeping we invite Death is thy host his banquet asks thy soul, Thy garlands hang within the House of Night, And the black stream alone shall fill thy bowl.
Now sweet, as when the silv'ry wave Delights the pebbly beach to lave; And now majestic as the sound Of rolling thunder gathering round; Now pealing more loudly, as when from yon height Descends the mad mountain-stream, foaming and bright; Now in a song of love Dying away, As through the aspen grove Soft zephyrs play: Now heavier and more mournful seems the strain, As when across the desert, death-like plain, Whence whispers dread and yells despairing rise, Cocytus' sluggish, wailing current sighs.
The black Cocytus wandering with languid current, and the infamous race of Danaus, and Sisyphus, the son of the Aeolus, doomed to eternal toil, must be visited; your land and house and pleasing wife must be left, nor shall any of those trees, which you are nursing, follow you, their master for a brief space, except the hated cypresses; a worthier heir shall consume your Caecuban wines now guarded with a hundred keys, and shall wet the pavement with the haughty wine, more exquisite than what graces pontifical entertainment.
In five lines of Paradise Lost Milton introduces four such etymologies, namely, those of the four fabled rivers of hell, though this will sometimes escape the notice of the English reader: 'Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate, Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep, Cocytus, named of lamentation loud Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon, Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.
I have no doubt that heaven imposes silence on the damned, otherwise heaven itself would be punished by their everlasting cry. The happiness of Olympus is bought by the silence of Cocytus. Then, people, be silent! I do better myself; I approve and admire. Just now I was enumerating the lords, and I ought to add to the list two archbishops and twenty-four bishops.
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