loody dews distained
The cold white cheek that was his pillow. So
Lies death embracing death!" [360]

In the midst of this description, by a fine stroke of art, Euridice,
the mother of Haemon, abruptly and silently quits the stage [361].
When next we hear of her, she has destroyed herself, with her last
breath cursing her husband as the murderer of her child. The end of
the play leaves Creon the surviver. He himself does not perish, for
he himself has never excited our sympathies [362]. He is punished
through his son and wife--they dead, our interest ceases in him, and
to add his death to theirs and to that of Antigone would be bathos.

VIII. In the tragedy of "Electra," the character of the heroine
stands out in the boldest contrast to the creation of the Antigone;
both are endowed with surpassing majesty and strength of nature--they
are loftier than the daughters of men, their very loveliness is of an
age when gods were no distant ancestors of kings--when, as in the
early sculptors of Pallas, or even of Aphrodite, something of the
severe and stern was deemed necessary to the realization of the
divine; and the beautiful had not lost the colossal proportions of the
sublime. But the strength and heroism of Antigone is derived from
love--love, sober, serene, august--but still love. Electra, on the
contrary, is supported and exalted above her sex by the might of her
hatred. Her father, "the king of men," foully murdered in his palace
--herself compelled to consort with his assassins--to receive from
their hands both charity and insult--the adulterous murderer on her
father's throne, and lord of her father's marriage bed [363]--her
brother a wanderer and an outcast. Such are the thoughts unceasingly
before her!--her heart and soul have for years fed upon the bitterness
of a resentment, at once impotent and intense, and nature itself has
turned to gall. She sees not in Clytemnestra a mother, but the
murderess of a father. The doubt and the compunction of the modern
Hamlet are unknown to her more masculine spirit. She lives on but in
the hope of her brother's return and of revenge. The play opens with
the appearance of Orestes, Pylades, and an old attendant--arrived at
break of day at the habitation of the Pelopidae--"reeking with blood"
--the seats of Agamemnon. Orestes, who had been saved in childhood by
his sister from the designs of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, has now
returned in manhood. It is