THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.
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as he left her, watch-dog by his house, to him all kindness, to his foes a foe, and for the rest unaltered.”
In the female characters put upon the stage by Sophocles we can trace within the influence of his friend Socrates, or the sympathy of view which may have formed the bond between them. My present limits will only allow me to speak of two of these characters, Electra and Antigone. Both of these women are rebels against authority. In both of them high courage is combined with womanly sweetness and purity. Electra is the unhappy eldest daughter of the murdered Agamemnon, condemned to live in the daily sight of her mother’s contented union with her paramour, the accomplice of her bloody crime. In this crowned triumph of evil Electra does not for one moment acquiesce. Her first act after her father’s death had been to convey her child brother, Orestes, to a place of safe concealment. Her only hope in life is that he will return to avenge his father’s untimely end. In her first appearance upon the scene she bewails the tragedy of her house.
“ And thou, my father, hast no pity gained,
Though thou a death hast died so grevious and so foul;
, But I, at least, will never, while I live,
Refrain mine eyes from tears,
Nor get my voice from wailings sad and sore;
But,like a nightingale of brood bereaved,
Before the gates, I speak them forth to all.”
In the Clytemnestra of /Eschylus we are shown the full, fiery sweep of feminine passion, in the height and boast of its rebellion redeemed from vileness by the dreadful antecedent of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, and the unquenchable anger sternly kindled in the mother’s breast. In hiß Cassandra we have the wild sibyl, gifted with superhuman insight and touched with divine fire, but all unable to avert the doom which she foresees.
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And in these gracious and more purely feminine types presented by Sophocles, we admire the union of womanly tenderness with womanly courage.