Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/255

TREASURE TOMBS AT MYKENÆ Kass.—Alas, my Sire,—thee and thy noble brood!

Chor.—How now? What horror turns thee back again?

Kass.—Faugh! faugh!

Chor.—Why such a cry? There's something chills thy soul!

Kass.—The halls breathe murder—ay, they drip with blood.

Chor.—How? 'Tis the smell of victims at the hearth.

Kass.—Nay, but the exhalation of the tomb!

Chor.—No Syrian dainty, this, of which thou speakest.

Kass. (at the portal)—Yet will I in the palace wail my own

And Agamemnon's fate! Enough of life!

Alas, O friends!

Yet not for naught I quail, not as a bird

Snared in the bush: bear witness, though I die,

A woman's slaughter shall requite my own,

And, for this man ill-yoked a man shall fall!

Thus prays of you a stranger, at death's door.

Chor.—Lost one, I rue with thee thy foretold doom!

Kass.—Once more I fain would utter words, once more,—

'Tis my own threne! And I invoke the Sun,

By his last beam, that my detested foes

May pay no less to them who shall avenge me,

Than I who die an unresisting slave!

(She enters the palace.) Chor.—Of Fortune was never yet enow

To mortal man; and no one ever

Her presence from his house would sever

And point, and say, "Come no more nigh!"

Unto our King granted the Gods on high

That Priam's towers should bow,

And homeward, crowned of Heaven, hath he come;

But now if, for the ancestral blood that lay

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