They both survive.
Golden Apollo, lend thy choicest beams!
Lay them an offering at the throne of Jove!
For I am poor and dumb.
If social bonds
Or ties more close connect thee with this house,
As this thy rapturous joy betrayeth to me,
O then rein in thy heart and hold it fast!
For insupportable the sudden plunge
From happiness to sorrow’s gloomy depth.
Thou knowest only Agamemnon’s death.
And is not this intelligence enough?
Half of the horror only hast thou heard.
What should I fear’? Orestes, Electra lives.
And fearest thou for Clytemnestra naught?
Her, neither hope nor fear have power to save.
She to the land of hope hath bid farewell.
Did her repentant hand shed her own blood?
Not so; yet her own blood inflicted death.
More plainly speak, nor leave me in suspense.
Uncertainty around my anxious head
Her dusky, thousand-folded pinion waves.
Have then the powers above selected me
To be the herald of a dreadful deed,
Which in the drear and soundless realms of night
I fain would hide for ever? ’Gainst my will
Thy gentle voice constrains me; it demands,
And shall receive, a tale of direst woe.
Electra, on the day when fell her sire,
Her brother from impending doom conceal’d;
Him Strophius, his father’s relative,
Receiv’d with kindest care, and rear’d him up
With his own son, named Pylades, who soon
Around the stranger twin’d love’s fairest bonds.
And as they grew, within their inmost souls
There sprang the burning longing to revenge
The monarch’s death. Unlook’d for, and disguis’d,
They reach Mycene, feigning to have brought
The mournful tidings of Orestes’ death,
Together with his ashes. Them the queen
Gladly receives. Within the house they enter;
Orestes to Electra shows himself:
She fans the fires of vengeance into flame,
Which in the sacred presence of a mother
Had burn’d more dimly. Silently she leads
Her brother to the spot where fell their sire;
Where lurid blood-marks, on the oft-wash’d floor,