een and the woe that is to come, passes in pictures across her
inner sense. In a series of broken ejaculations, not sentences but lyric
cries, she evokes the scenes of the past and of the future. Blood drips
from the palace; in its chambers the Furies crouch; the murdered sons of
Thyestes wail in its haunted courts; and ever among the visions of the
past that one of the future floats and fades, clearly discerned,
impossible to avert, the murder of a husband by a wife; and in the rear
of that, most pitiful of all, the violent death of the seer who sees in
vain and may not help. Between Cassandra and the Chorus it is a duet of
anguish and fear; in the broken lyric phrases a phantom music wails;
till at last, at what seems the breaking-point, the tension is relaxed,
and dropping into the calmer iambic recitative, Cassandra tells her
message in plainer speech and clearly proclaims the murder of the King.
Then, with a last appeal to the avenger that is to come, she enters the
palace alone to meet her death.--The stage is empty. Suddenly a cry is
heard from within; again, and then again; while the chorus hesitate the
deed is done; the doors are thrown open, and Clytemnestra is seen
standing over the corpses of her victims. All disguise is now thrown
off; the murderess avows and triumphs in her deed; she justifies it as
vengeance for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and sees in herself not a free
human agent but the incarnate curse of the House of Tantalus. And now
for the first time appears the adulterer Aegisthus, who has planned the
whole behind the scenes. He too is an avenger, for he is the son of that
Thyestes who was made to feed on his own children's flesh. The murder of
Agamemnon is but one more link in the long chain of hereditary guilt;
and with that exposition of the pitiless law of punishment and crime
this chapter of the great drama comes to a close. But the _Agamemnon_ is
only the first of a series of three plays closely connected and meant to
be performed in succession; and the problem raised in the first of them,
the crime that cries for punishment and the punishment that is itself a
new crime, is solved in the last by a reconciliation of the powers of
heaven and hell, and the pardon of the last offender in the person of
Orestes. To sketch, however, the plan of the other dramas of the trilogy
would be to trespass too far upon our space and time. It is enough to
have illustrated, by the example of the _Agamemnon_, the