Page:Sophocles - Seven Plays, 1900.djvu/196

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For not an enemy—this petition shows it—

But of his friends or kindred, is this maid.

[The urn is given into hands

. O monument of him whom o’er all else

I loved! sole relic of Orestes’ life,

How cold in this thy welcome is the hope

Wherein I decked thee as I sent thee forth!

Then bright was thy departure, whom I now

Bear lightly, a mere nothing, in my hands.

Would I had gone from life, ere I dispatched

Thee from my arms that saved thee to a land

Of strangers, stealing thee from death! For then

Thou hadst been quiet on that far-off day,

And had thy portion in our father’s tomb.

Now thou hast perished in the stranger land

Far from thy sister, lorn and comfortless.

And I, O wretchedness! neither have bathed

And laid thee forth, nor from the blazing fire

Collected the sad burden, as was meet:

But thou, when foreign hands have tended thee,

Com’st a small handful in a narrow shell.

Woe for the constant care I spent on thee

Of old all vainly, with sweet toil! For never

Wast thou thy mother’s darling, nay, but mine,

And I of all the household most thy nurse,

While ‘sister, sister,’ was thy voice to me.

But now all this is vanished in one day,

Dying in thy death. Thou hast carried all away

As with a whirlwind, and art gone. No more

My father lives: thyself art lost in death:

I am dead, who lived in thee. Our enemies

Laugh loudly and she maddens in her joy,

Our mother most unmotherly, of whom

Thy secret missives oft times told me, thou

Wouldst be the punisher. But that fair hope

The hapless Genius of thy lot and mine

Hath reft away, and gives thee thus to me,—

For thy loved form thy dust and fruitless shade.

O bitterness! O piteous sight! Woe! woe!

Oh! sent on thy dire journey, dearest one,