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To me this refuge represented the most various phases of human life, shadowed by misfortune; sometimes the peace of the graveyard without the dead, who speak in the language of epitaphs; one day I saw in it the home of lepers; another, the house of the Atridae; but, above all, I found there provincial life, with its contemplative ideas, its hour-glass existence.
Would you know how a prince, heroic from misfortunes, and descended from a line of kings, whose race seemed to be doomed like the Atridae of old would you know how he was employed, when the envoy who came to him through danger and difficulty beheld him for the first time?
Like thee I will spread the influence of my arms to nations whoso glory shall be my name; and as thy sons, my fathers, expelled from Sparta, returned thither with sword and spear to defeat usurpers and to found the long dynasty of the Heracleids, even so may it be mine to visit that dread abode of torturers and spies, and to build up in the halls of the Atridae a power worthier of the lineage of the demigod.
At length the young man, by a violent effort, speaks abruptly out, "Thou must sail to Troy to the Greeks the Atridae." "The Greeks the Atridae!" the betrayers of Philoctetes those beyond pardon those whom for ten years he has pursued with the curses of a wronged, and deserted, and solitary spirit. "Give me back," he cries, "my bow and arrows."
In the fury of madness he sallies from his tent at night slaughters the flocks, in which his insanity sees the Greeks, whose award has galled and humbled him and supposes he has slain the Atridae and captured Ulysses.
It is she who recalls to the chorus, to the shuddering audience, that it is the house of the long-fated Atridae, to which their descendant has returned "that human shamble-house that bloody floor that dwelling, abhorred by Heaven, privy to so many horrors against the most sacred ties;" the doom yet hangs over the inexpiable threshold; the curse passes from generation to generation; Agamemnon is the victim of his sires.
But that must remain wrapped in mystery a hideous mystery, the blood of the Atridae. . . ." He took my hand, and added, in a broken voice: "Bernard, we are both of us victims of a vicious family. This is not the moment to pile up charges against those who in this very hour are standing before the terrible tribunal of God; but they have done me an irreparable wrong they have broken my heart.
I had written pretty fully to my brother how affairs were standing with me in England. Then, on the 25th October, comes the news that his Majesty has fallen down dead at Kensington, and that George III. reigned over us. I fear we grieved but little. What do those care for the Atridae whose hearts are strung only to erota mounon?
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