proach. Day and night, as she tells the Chorus, she had been mourning over the ruin of her race in the plaintive strains of the nightingale, whose note was proverbial among the Greeks for a never-ending grief; and she had been rated by her mother much in the same style as Hamlet is lectured by his uncle:—
"To persevere
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness.
...'Tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature;
To reason most absurd; whose common theme
Is death of fathers."[1]
Then, again, these tears had been followed by a sterner feeling, and soon
"Vengeance, deep-brooding o'er the slain,
Had locked the source of softer woe."
She had cherished the thought of a day of retribution, and had implored all the gods of the lower world not to overlook the shedding of innocent blood, or to allow "the guile which devised and the lust which struck the blow" to go for long unpunished. But years had passed, and still Orestes, for whose coming she had prayed, came not; and Electra, in her despair, had begun to question the justice of those careless gods who allowed the guilty to flourish in their sin, and murder to go unavenged—
"For if the dull earth cover thus the blood
