With motions strange An enterprise audacious soars within me; A vast reproach and ills yet graver still Will break on me if the event miscarry; But, see, I place it on your knees! Be true, Be only true and worthy of your fame, So your assistance shall declare it truth, Truth glorified through me. And to this reply of Thoas: What! you believe The Scythian wild and the barbarian Hear the wise voice of Truth and hearts humane When Atreus of Greece still failed to hear. she answers with the gentlest, purest trust: Nay, all thus hear Beneath whatever sky their birth was laid; All needs must hear for whom the springs of life Flow without let and purely through the soul. Then it is she makes the final call upon her greatness of soul, and the tenderness of her faith at its highest point of effort; her entreaty touches, then masters and wrings from him, in a way that must appeal to every heart, the permission to return to her own. This alone is necessary. She has no need of the statue of the goddess; she can depart on her journey without deceit or betrayal of trust. And it is with the finest sense of beauty that Goethe refers here to the oracular word of the god: Bring but to Greece again the sister who All loth at heart in holy temple bides On shores of Tauris, and the curse is gone. The very human reconciliation disclosed in these words is clearly that the pure and holy Iphigenia, the sister, is in fact the divine personification and the protectress of the house. Noble and beautiful I wot in sooth All that the goddess counselled seemed to me, exclaims Orestes to Thoas and Iphigenia: Like to a holy picture The fate unalterable which walled our town By one mysterious word, one word Divine, Is banished, now that city takes thee back, Who art the true protectress of our home; Reserve thyself in holy quietness, A blessing to thy brother and thine own; It seemed that all deliverance on Earth Had passed away, and all comes back with thee. In the spirit of these healing words of reconciliation Iphigenia has already revealed herself to Orestes by virtue of the purity and ethical beauty of her inner life. It is true that her discernment drives him half mad, who in the convulsion of his spirit has lost all faith in peace; but the pure love of the sister does not fail to heal him from every pang with which he is tortured by the Furies of his soul: Within thine arms The evil clawed me with its direst clutch For the last time, and to the very marrow I shuddered horribly: and then it vanished, E'en as a serpent to its lair. Anew, And all through thee, the day's breadth I enjoy. Here, as elsewhere throughout it, we can hardly emphasize sufficiently our admiration for the profound beauty of this poem.