Transpierced that awful priesthood—one and all.
Lovely as in a picture stood she by
As she would speak. Thus at her father's feasts
The virgin, 'mid the revelling guests,
Was wont with her chaste voice to supplicate
For her dear father an auspicious fate."
At the end of this sad story the Chorus cease. This omen was but too true; yet it is no gain, they say, to know the future—it is only antedating sorrow. Yet may better days come now.
Such hopes are little better than forebodings.
That beautiful picture of the death of Iphigenia has been the theme of many poets. Euripides has a tragedy upon it—the "Iphigenia in Aulis;" and among the Romans, Lucretius has described it finely, translating and almost improving the two tragedians, as an instance of the evils to which religion has prompted men; and Tennyson has drawn the whole in a few lines with intense vividness, in his "Dream of Fair Women."
"With the sound of these prophetic strains yet in their ears, the Chorus sees the approach of—Clytemnestra. Their strain has prepared us for something dreadful in the face and figure of the avenging Queen,—
'For ne'er was mortal sound so full of woe.'
She comes—and then we have such a description as makes the glow-worm light of modern poetry
'Pale its ineffectual fires.'
