"Then, glaring on his father with wild eyes, The son stood dumb, and spat upon his face, And clutched the unnatural sword--the father fled, And, wroth, as with the arm that missed a parent, The wretched man drove home unto his breast The abhorrent steel; yet ever, while dim sense Struggled within the fast-expiring soul-- Feebler, and feebler still, his stiffening arms Clung to that virgin form--and every gasp Of his last breath with bloody 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 agreed that, in order to lull all