Whether 'Twere Rightly Said, Live Concealed. (7)

And yet it is certain, in the regions prepared for pious souls, they conserve not only an existence in (or agreeable to) nature, but are encircled with glory.

There the sun with glorious ray,

Chasing shady night away,

Makes an everlasting day;

Where souls in fields of purple roses play;

Others in verdant plains disport,

Crowned with trees of every sort,

Trees that never fruit do bear,

But always in the blossom are.

[*]

The rivers there without rude murmurs gently glide, and there they meet and bear each other company, passing away their time in commemorating and running over things past and present.

A third state there is of them who have led vicious and wicked lives, which precipitates souls into a kind of hell and miserable abyss,

Where sluggish streams of sable night

Spout floods of darkness infinite.

[*]

This is the receptacle of the tormented; here lie they hid under the veils of eternal ignorance and oblivion. For vultures do not everlastingly gorge themselves upon the liver of a wicked man, exposed by angry Gods upon the earth, as poets fondly feign of Prometheus. For either rottenness or the funeral pile hath consumed that long ago. Nor do the bodies of the tormented undergo (as Sisyphus is fabled to do) the toil and pressure of weighty burdens;

For strength no longer flesh and bone sustains.[*]

There are no reliques of the body in dead men which stripes and tortures can make impressions on; but in very truth the sole punishment of ill-livers is an inglorious obscurity, or a final abolition, which through oblivion hurls and plunges them into deplorable rivers, bottomless seas, and a dark abyss, involving all in uselessness and inactivity, absolute ignorance and obscurity, as their last and eternal doom.