ARKAS

If thou wilt ever call thyself unblest,
I must accuse thee of ingratitude.

IPHIGENIA

Thanks have you ever.

ARKAS

Not the honest thanks
Which prompt the heart to offices of love;
The joyous glance, revealing to the host
A grateful spirit, with its lot content. 
When thee a deep mysterious destiny
Brought to this sacred fane, long years ago,
To greet thee, as a treasure sent from heaven,
With reverence and affection, Thoas came. 
Benign and friendly was this shore to thee,
To every stranger else with horror fraught,
For, till thy coming, none e’er trod our realm
But fell, according to an ancient rite,
A bloody victim at Diana’s shrine.

IPHIGENIA

Freely to breathe alone is not to live. 
Say, is it life, within this holy fane,
Like a poor ghost around its sepulchre
To linger out my days?  Or call you that
A life of conscious happiness and joy,
When every hour, dream’d listlessly away,
Still leadeth onward to those gloomy days,
Which the sad troop of the departed spend
In self-forgetfulness on Lethe’s shore? 
A useless life is but an early death;
This woman’s destiny hath still been mine.

ARKAS

I can forgive, though I must needs deplore,
The noble pride which underrates itself;
It robs thee of the happiness of life. 
But hast thou, since thy coming here, done naught? 
Who hath the monarch’s gloomy temper cheered? 
Who hath with gentle eloquence annull’d,
From year to year, the usage of our sires,
By which, a victim at Diana’s shrine,
Each stranger perish’d, thus from certain death
Sending so oft the rescued captive home? 
Hath not Diana, harboring no revenge
For this suspension of her bloody rites,
In richest measure heard thy gentle prayer? 
On joyous pinions o’er the advancing host,
Doth not triumphant conquest proudly soar? 
And feels not every one a happier lot,
Since Thoas, who so long hath guided us
With wisdom and with valor, sway’d by thee. 
The joy of mild benignity approves,
Which leads him to relax the rigid claims
Of mute submission?  Call thyself useless!  Thou,
When from thy being o’er a thousand hearts,
A healing balsam flows? when to a race,
To whom a god consign’d thee, thou dost prove
A fountain of perpetual happiness,
And from this dire inhospitable coast,
Dost to the stranger grant a safe return?

IPHIGENIA

The little done doth vanish to the mind,
Which forward sees how much remains to do.

ARKAS