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Rh dashed open the doors of the fatal bridal chamber; and when Œdipus had followed her, raging for a sword to slay her who had been the innocent cause of his misfortunes, he finds her, his wife and mother, hanging by a noose from the ceiling, already dead. Then he tears the body down with a wild cry, and wrenching the golden buckle from her dress, he dashes the point into the pupils of his eyes—thus condemning himself to that perpetual darkness with which he had taunted Teiresias. "His feeling," says Bishop Thirlwall, "is not horror of the light and of all the objects it can present to him, but indignation at his own previous blindness. The eyes which have served him so ill, which have seen without discerning what it was most important for him to know, shall be extinguished for ever."

Well might the messenger say, at the close of his speech, that in the tragedy which he had just recounted,

All the rivers of the earth could not wash away the pollution which clings to the house and family.

The palace-doors are now rolled back, and Œdipus comes forward with wild gestures, the gore still streaming from eyes that are "irrecoverably dark amid the blaze of noon." The Chorus, horror-stricken, cannot endure the sight, and hide their faces in their robes. Pity and consolation are out of place in the presence of such misery as his. They can only utter