Yet, when, a moment after, Cassandra appears, singing, wildly, her
inspired song, Hecuba calls her, "My _frantic_ child."

Yet how graceful she is in her tragic _raptus_, the chorus shows.

"_Chorus_. How sweetly at thy house's ills thou smil'st,
Chanting what, haply, thou wilt not show true."


If Hecuba dares not trust her highest instinct about her daughter,
still less can the vulgar mind of the herald Talthybius, a man not
without feeling, but with no princely, no poetic blood, abide the
wild, prophetic mood which insults all his prejudices.

"_Tal_. The venerable, and that accounted wise,
Is nothing better than that of no repute;
For the greatest king of all the Greeks,
The dear son of Atreus, a possessed with the love
Of this mad-Woman. I, indeed, am poor;
Yet I would not receive her to my bed."


The royal Agamemnon could see the beauty of Cassandra; _he_ was
not afraid of her prophetic gifts.

The best topic for a chapter on this subject, in the present day,
would be the history of the Seeress of Prevorst, the best observed
subject of magnetism in our present times, and who, like her
ancestresses of Delphos, was roused to ecstasy or phrensy by the touch