delight and torment, up to the mightiest onslaught, the most powerful endeavor to find the breach which shall open to the heart the path to the ocean of the endless joy of love.  In vain!  Its power spent, the heart sinks back to thirst with desire, with desire unfulfilled, as each fruition only brings forth seeds of fresh desire, till, at last, in the depths of its exhaustion, the starting eye sees the glimmering of the highest bliss of attainment.  It is the ecstasy of dying, of the surrender of being, of the final redemption into that wondrous realm from which we wander farthest when we strive to take it by force.  Shall we call this Death?  Is it not rather the wonder world of night, out of which, so says the story, the ivy and the vine sprang forth in tight embrace o’er the tomb of Tristan and Isolde?

If we place ourselves in spirit among the personages of Wagner’s play, we shall find ourselves at the parting of the curtain which hangs between the real and the mimic world, on board a mediaeval ship, within a few hours’ sail of Cornwall, whither Tristan is bearing Isolde to be the wife of his king Marke.  The cheery song of a sailor who, unseen, at the masthead, sings to the winds which are blowing him away from his wild Irish sweetheart, floats down to us.  It has a refreshing and buoyant lilt, this song, with something of the sea breeze in it, and yet something, as it is sung, which emphasizes the loneliness of the singer:—­

[Musical excerpt—­“Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat zu:  Mein irisch Kind, wo weilest du?”]

An innocent song, the strain of which, more decorous than any modern chantey, inspires the sailors as they pull at the ropes, and gives voice to the delights of the peaceful voyage:—­

[Musical excerpt]

Yet it stirs up a tempest in the soul of Isolde.  She is the daughter of an Irish queen, a sorceress, and she now deplores the degeneracy of her race and its former potency.  Once her ancestors could command wind and wave, but now they can brew only balsamic potions.  Wildly she invokes the elements to dash the ship to pieces, and when her maid, Brangane, seeks to know the cause of her tumultuous disquiet, she tells the story of her love for Tristan and of its disgraceful requital.  He had come to Ireland’s queen to be healed of a wound received in battle.  He had killed his enemy, and that enemy was Morold, Isolde’s betrothed.  The princess, ignorant of that fact,—­ignorant, too, of his name, for he had called himself Tantris,—­had herself nursed him back almost to health, when one day she found that a splinter of steel, taken from the head of Morold, where he had received the adolorous stroke, fitted into a nick in the sword of the wounded knight.  At her mercy lay the slayer of her affianced husband.  She raised the sword to take revenge, when his look fell upon her.  In a twinkling her heart was empty of hate and filled instead with love.  Now, instead of requiting her love, Tristan is taking her to Cornwall to deliver her to a loveless marriage to Cornwall’s “weary king.”  It will be well to note in this narrative how the description of Tristan’s sufferings are set to a descending chromatic passage, like the second voice of the principal theme already described:—­