Page:Sophocles (Storr 1919) v2.djvu/227

 Not for this dust alone, but for myself

And all my house withal, I’ll weep and wail.

Bring it and give it her, whoe’er she be;

For not as an ill-wisher, but as friend,

Or haply near of kin, she asks the boon.

Last relics of the man I most did love,

Orestes! high in hope I sent thee forth;

How hast thou dashed all hope in thy return!

Radiant as day thou speddest forth, and now

I hold a dusty nothing in my hands.

Would I had died before I rescued thee

From death and sent thee to a foreign land!

Then hadst thou fallen together with thy sire

And lain beside him in the ancestral tomb:

Now in a strange land, exiled, far from home,

Far from thy sister thou hast died, ah me!

How miserably! I was not by to lave

And deck with loving hands thy corse, and snatch

Thy charred bones from out the flaming pyre.

Alas! by foreign hands these rites were paid,

And now thou comest back to me, of dust

A little burden in this little urn.

O for the nursing and the toil, no toil,

I spent on thee an infant, all in vain!

For thou wast ne’er thy mother’s babe, but mine;

Thou hadst no nurse in all the house but me,

I was thy sister, none so called but me.

But now all this hath vanished in a day, 215