In this tense dramatic moment, we are shown what the theme of the Drama is to be. We are shown too, as vividly and almost as rapidly as in a lightning-flash, the clear outlines of Electra’s character. The beautiful devotion to her father’s memory: the blind hatred of Clytemnestra: the desire for revenge vaguely forming, and leaping full-grown at the first prompting from without; but—and here is the crux—that desire held in check by a profound religious sentiment. This reverence for the gods makes the whole tragedy, for Electra and Orestes both; it provides the dramatist with the inevitable inner conflict round which the action will revolve; and, most important of all, it has an ethical significance which will sanctify the revenge of Electra and Orestes. For while the mere human impulse with them both is to strike back rapidly and without mercy for the blow that has killed their father, a higher sense restrains them; and it needs an imperious mandate from Apollo to nerve them to the deed. This reluctance for the shedding of blood is a new thing in the age-long record of the house of Tantalus. When Electra asks whether the gods will not frown upon a prayer for vengeance, there is the birth of a holier spirit which will atone for and purify all those old crimes. But first the final retribution must fall. Electra now lifts her voice in solemn prayer to the awful gods of the underworld and to the spirit of her father. She prays for a wiser heart and purer hand than her mother’s. With almost faltering words—literally constrained thereto, she says—she prays for vengeance; and she implores that Orestes may return and claim the throne now occupied by the hated Egisthus. It is at this moment, just as the prayer closes in the Choral hymn, that Electra sees the locks of hair upon the tomb. She is amazed, almost alarmed. There is only one creature in all the world who should bring such an offering. If any other has placed it here, it is an act of sacrilege. She takes up the hair, examines it, and speaks about it rapidly and anxiously to the women. Gradually the conviction dawns that it can be no other than a votive lock shorn from the head of Orestes himself. Then he has been here? But where is he now? The thought that he has indeed returned, that he may even be near at hand at this moment, drives wild hope and fear alternately through her mind. Holding the lock within her hand, she says: “_Ah! could it but speak, and tell me Kind news, I were not shaken thus and cloven, Thinking two ways: but either with clear scorn I would renounce it, as an enemy’s hair; Or being my brother’s, it should mourn with me, And pay sweet honours at our father’s tomb._“[16]