"Alas! alas! for myself I fear
Mine own death-hour of agony!
Oh, wherefore do ye lead me here?
Oh, wherefore, hut with him to die?"
Each wild utterance of Cassandra is followed by a short song from the orchestra in comment on her words. "Why," asks the Chorus,—
"Why heaven-struck, heaping ill on ill,
Pour'st thou thy frantic sorrows vain?
Why shrieks thy voice, ill-omened still,
Its awful burthen in awakening strain?
Why roams thy sad prophetic song
Only the paths of grief along?"
Again she is tortured with visions of the past scenes of horror that have defiled the house of Pelops. The murdered children of Thyestes pass before her eyes, with the same terrible distinctness with which the children and the eight kings force themselves on the fancy of Macbeth:—
"See, see ye not upon yon palace-roofs,
Like shapes in dreams, they stand and jibber there,
The children murdered by their nearest kin?
Lo, there they are, in their full-laden hands
Entrails and bowels, horrible food, on which
Their fathers have been feasting."
Vengeance is coming for these things upon the house of Atreus; and though the she-wolf welcomes her lord with flattering words, yet death is certainly prepared for him. There is no longer any concealment. Cassandra foretells in plain words the crime of Clytem-
