It does "somehow spoil one's taste for twitterings." And so, above all, do his great dramatic speeches, so ruggedly grand that at first sight one is often blind to the keen psychology of passion in them—for instance, that in which Clytæmestra gives public welcome to her husband. She does not know whether he has been told of her unfaithfulness; she does know that she is utterly friendless, that the man whom she dreaded in her dreams is returned, and that the last hour for one or other of them has come. She tries, like one near to death, to leave some statement of her case. She is near breaking down more than once; but she gathers courage as she speaks, and ends in the recklessness of nervous exaltation:—
"Freemen of Argos, and ye gathered Elders,
I shall not hold it shame in the midst of you
To outspeak the love ye well know burns within me.
There comes a time when all fear fades and dies.
Who else can speak? Does any heart but mine
Know the long burden of the life I bore
While he was under Troy? A lonely woman
Set in a desolate house, no man's arm near
To lean on—Oh, 'tis a wrong to make one mad!
Voices of wrath ring ever in her ears:
Now, he is come! Now, 'tis a messenger:
And every tale worse tidings than the last,
And men's cries loud against the walls that hold her!
If all the wounds that channelled rumour bore
Have reached this King's flesh—why, 'tis all a net,
A toil of riddled meshes! Died he there
With all the deaths that crowded in men's mouths,
Then is he not some Gêryon, triple-lived,
Three-bodied, monstrous, to be slain and slain
Till every life be quelled? . . . Belike ye have told him
Of my death-thirst—the rope above the lintel.
And how they cut me down? True: 'twas those voices,
The wrath and hatred surging in mine ears.
