sadness, far from parting?” For it is the profoundest secret of the world which here must be guessed by love—­the final unity of two souls and through it unity with all life.  Clearer and clearer and more and more compelling looms the thought of a common death, until it is grasped and comprehended; the lovers realise that to be completely one they must surrender their lives, and that by losing life they can lose nothing essential.  “All death can destroy is that which divides us.”  Ultimately Tristan pronounces the final decision, and Isolde repeats it word by word, follows it step by step like a sleep-walker, so as to make it quite her own.  “Thus should we die no more to part, in endless joy, one soul, one heart, never waking, never haunted by pale fear, in love undaunted, each to each united aye, dream of love’s eternity.”  The grand, artistic symbol for this state of consciousness touches metaphysic.  Wagner introduces night as the visible emblem of an existence in a world—­inconceivable by our senses—­beyond the grave, in contrast to the earthly day, to “the day’s deceptive glamour.”  (Nietzsche later on adopted this symbol “midnight” as the emblem of everything lofty.) The lovers who in their day-consciousness believed that they hated each other, now that they are walking towards eternal night divine that which is beyond the reach of their separated selves, beyond all illusion and duality.  The duality is outwardly expressed by their different names, separated and united “by the little word and.”  All at once the knowledge dawns upon them that great love cannot be consummated in the day of the world, but that it points to a life beyond.  They have discovered the final meaning of life and the world—­the annihilation of individual life and death through love—­analogous to the last wisdom of the mystic:  “To become God.”  “I myself am the world.”  Death is the inevitable corollary of supreme love.  But as they tremblingly yearn for and await the inconceivable, earth once more stretches out her arms to them, the dream of metaphysical existence melts slowly away.  In the orchestration phantoms of the day, dreams of morning, suppress the new, the divined conception.

At the opening of the third act the motif for horns and violas gradually ascending and dying away, expresses the unspeakable dreariness and senselessness of material life, after its profound meaning, the re-creation of the world by love, has been lost.  This feeling of absolute senselessness dominates the awakening sleeper; Tristan, interpreting it in the sense of Schopenhauer as the universal aimlessness of the world and of life, is merely expressing the doom of his own longing for the supreme:  he has divined and has lost the loftiest value.  Wagner intuitively perceives that sin is a component part of the supreme sublimation of love and personality; Tristan must curse himself and the beloved woman because love, as the last consequence of sin, demands the love-death, which can never find completion; “The terrible draught myself I have brewed it!  A curse on thee, terrible draught!  A curse on him who brewed it!”