Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 08.djvu/112

 She sends these offerings, in hope to win A cure to cleave and sunder sin from doom,

Orestes

Earth and my father’s grave, to you I call Give this her dream fulfilment, and thro’ me. I read it in each part coincident With what shall be; for mark, that serpent sprang From the same womb as I, in swaddling bands By the same hands was swathed, lipped the same breast, And sucking forth the same sweet mother'smilk Infused a clot of blood; and in alarm She cried upon her wound the cry of pain. The rede is clear: the thing of dread she nursed, The death of blood she dies; and I, ’tis I, In semblance of a serpent, that must slay her. Thou art my seer, and thus I read the dream.

Chorus

So do; yet ere thou doest, speak to us, Bidding some act, some, by not acting, aid.

Orestes

Brief my command: I bid my sister pass In silence to the house, and all I bid This my design with wariness conceal, That they who did by craft a chieftain slay May by like craft and in like noose be ta'en, Dying the death which Loxias foretold Apollo, king and prophet undisproved. I with this warrior Pylades will come In likeness of a stranger, full equipt As travellers come, and at the palace gates Will stand, as stranger, yet in friendship’s bond Unto this house allied; and each of us Will speak the tongue that round Parnassus sounds, Feigning such speech as Phocian voices use.