[26] Her statues meet, as round they rise, The leaden stare of lifeless eyes.
Where is their ancient beauty gone ?-- Why loathe his looks the breathing stone?
Alas! the foulness of disgrace Hath swept the Venus from her face! And visions in the mournful night Shall dupe the heart to false delight, A false and melancholy; For naught with sadder joy is fraught, Than things at night by dreaming brought, The wish'd for and the holy.
Swift from the solitary side, The vision and the blessing glide, Scarce welcomed ere they sweep, Pale, bloodless, dreams, aloft On wings unseen and soft, Lost wanderers gliding through the paths of sleep." But the master-terror of this tragedy is in the introduction of Cassandra, who accompanies Agamemnon, and who, in the very hour of his return, amid the pomp and joy that welcome the "king of men," is seized with the prophetic inspiration, and shrieks out those ominous warnings, fated ever to be heard in vain.

It is she who recalls to the chorus, to the shuddering audience, that it is the house of the long-fated Atridae, to which their descendant has returned--"that human shamble-house--that bloody floor--that dwelling, abhorred by Heaven, privy to so many horrors against the most sacred ties;" the doom yet hangs over the inexpiable threshold; the curse passes from generation to generation; Agamemnon is the victim of his sires.
Recalling the inhuman banquet served by Atreus to Thyestes of his own murdered children, she starts from the mangled spectres on the threshold: "See ye those infants crouching by the floor, Like phantom dreams, pale nurslings, that have perish'd By kindred hands." Gradually her ravings become clear and clearer, until at last she scents the "blood-dripping slaughter within;" a vapour rises to her nostrils as from a charnel house--her own fate, which she foresees at hand, begins to overpower her--her mood softens, and she enters the palace, about to become her tomb, with thoughts in which frantic terror has yielded to solemn and pathetic resignation: "Alas for mortals!--what their power and pride?
A little shadow sweeps it from the earth! And if they suffer--why, the fatal hour Comes o'er the record like a moistened sponge, And blots it out; _methinks this latter lot Affects me deepest--Well! 'tis pitiful!"_ [27] Scarcely has the prophetess withdrawn than we hear behind the scene the groans of the murdered king, the palace behind is opened, and Clytemnestra is standing, stern and lofty, by the dead body of her lord.

The critics have dwelt too much on the character of Clytemnestra--it is that of Cassandra which is the masterpiece of the tragedy.
XI.

The story, which is spread throughout three plays (forming a complete trilogy), continues in the opening of the Choephori, with Orestes mourning over his father's tomb.

If Clytemnestra has furnished would-be critics with a comparison with Lady Macbeth, for no other reason than that one murdered her husband, and the other persuaded her husband to murder somebody else, so Orestes may with more justice be called the Hamlet of the Greeks; but though the character itself of Orestes is not so complex and profound as that of Hamlet, nor the play so full of philosophical beauties as the modern tragedy, yet it has passages equally pathetic, and more sternly and terribly sublime.