Save only Agamemnon's children, all
Must pity her--and even we must pity.
Full ever of suspicion and of terror,
And held in scorn even by Aegisthus' self,
Loving Aegisthus though she know his guilt;
Repentant, and yet ready to renew
Her crime, perchance, if the unworthy love
Which is her shame and her abhorrence, would;
Now wife, now mother, never wife nor mother,
Bitter remorse gnaws at her heart by day
Unceasingly, and horrible shapes by night
Scare slumber from her eyes.--So fares it with her.

In the third scene of the following act Clytemnestra meets Orestes
and Pylades, who announce themselves as messengers from Phocis to the
king; she bids them deliver their tidings to her, and they finally
do so, Pylades struggling to prevent Orestes from revealing himself.
There are touchingly simple and natural passages in the lament that
Clytemnestra breaks into over her son's death, and there is fire, with
its true natural extinction in tears, when she upbraids Aegisthus, who
now enters:

My only son beloved, I gave thee all.

* * * * *

All that I gave thou did'st account as nothing
While aught remained to take. Who ever saw
At once so cruel and so false a heart?
The guilty love that thou did'st feign so ill