(_To Orestes_.) Far as thou couldst, thou
didst assist thy friends,"--
we know not how to blame the guilt of the maddened wife and mother. In
her last meeting with Agamemnon, as in her previous expostulations and
anguish, we see that a straw may turn the balance, and make her his
deadliest foe. Just then, came the suit of Aegisthus,--then, when
every feeling was uprooted or lacerated in her heart.
Iphigenia's moving address has no further effect than to make her
father turn at bay and brave this terrible crisis. He goes out, firm
in resolve; and she and her mother abandon themselves to a natural
grief.
Hitherto nothing has been seen in Iphigenia, except the young girl,
weak, delicate, full of feeling, and beautiful as a sunbeam on the
full, green tree. But, in the next scene, the first impulse of that
passion which makes and unmakes us, though unconfessed even to
herself, though hopeless and unreturned, raises her at once into the
heroic woman, worthy of the goddess who demands her.
Achilles appears to defend her, whom all others clamorously seek to
deliver to the murderous knife. She sees him, and, fired with thoughts
unknown before, devotes herself at once for the country which has
given birth to such a man.
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