are on the stage; the son--the
avenger, is within; suddenly the cries of Clytemnestra are heard.
Again--again! Orestes re-enters a parricide! [367] He retires as
Aegisthus is seen approaching; and the adulterous usurper is now
presented to us for the first and last time--the crowning victim of
the sacrifice. He comes flushed with joy and triumph. He has heard
that the dreaded Orestes is no more. Electra entertains him a few
moments with words darkly and exultingly ambiguous. He orders the
doors to be thrown open, that all Argos and Mycenae may see the
remains of his sole rival for the throne. The scene opens. On the
threshold (where, with the Greeks, the corpse of the dead was usually
set out to view) lies a body covered with a veil or pall. Orestes
(the supposed Phocian) stands beside.

"Aegisthus. Great Jove! a grateful spectacle!--if thus
May it be said unsinning; yet if she,
The awful Nemesis, be nigh and hear,
I do recall the sentence! Raise the pall.
The dead was kindred to me, and shall know
A kinsman's sorrow.
Orestes. Lift thyself the pall;
Not mine, but thine, the office to survey
That which lies mute beneath, and to salute,
Lovingly sad, the dead one.
Aegisthus. Be it so--
It is well said. Go thou and call the queen:
Is she within?
Orestes. Look not around for her--
She is beside thee!"

Aegisthus lifts the pall, and beholds the body of Clytemnestra! He
knows his fate at once. He knows that Orestes is before him. He
attempts to speak. The fierce Electra cuts him short, and Orestes,
with stern solemnity, conducts him from the stage to the spot on which
Aegisthus had slain Agamemnon, so that the murderer might die by the
son's hand in the place where the father fell. Thus artistically is
the catastrophe not lessened in effect, but heightened, by removing
the deed of death from the scene--the poetical justice, in the calm
and premeditated selection of the place of slaughter, elevates what on
the modern stage would be but a spectacle of physical horror into the
deeper terror and sublimer gloom of a moral awe; and vindictive
murder, losing its aspect, is idealized and hallowed into religious
sacrifice.

IX. Of the seven plays left to us, "The Trachiniae" is usually
considered the least imbued with the genius of Sophocles; and Schlegel
has even ventured on the conjecture, singu