tate, thanked him
warmly. Countess Mathilda left the Wartburg, and repaired to a castle
not far from Eisenach, whither Heinrich of Ofterdingen would have
followed her had not the Landgrave ordered that he should go through
with the contest to which the other masters had challenged him.

"'"Heinrich of Ofterdingen," the Landgrave said to this overweening
minstrel, "you have in ugly fashion broken up and disturbed, by those
unholy songs of yours, the fair and happy circle which I had collected
in this place. Me you could never beguile; I saw clearly, from the
beginning, that your songs did not come out of the depths of a pure,
honest singer's heart, but were the fruits of the teaching of some
false master. What avails outward ornamentation, glitter, and
brilliance, when what it covers is merely a lifeless corpse? You sing
of lofty matters, of mysteries of the universe, it is true, not as they
dawn in the hearts of men, as sweet presciences of a higher life, but
as the presumptuous astrologer tries to comprehend them, and reduce and
measure them with compass and scale. You should blush, Heinrich of
Ofterdingen, to think at what you have arrived, that your brave, honest
spirit has bent itself to serve an unworthy master."

"'"I know not, my Lord," said Heinrich, "how far I merit your
displeasure and your reproaches. You may possibly alter your opinion
when you hear who the master was who opened to me that province of song
which is his own special home. I left your Court in a condition of the
deepest melancholy; and it may have been that the pain, which then
threatened to destroy me, was in truth only caused by the powerful
effort of the germ within me to burst its way towards the fertilizing
breath of a higher life. In a strange and remarkable manner a little
book came to my hands, in which the greatest master of song on earth
had expounded, with the profoundest science, the principles of the art,
adding one or two compositions of his own. The more I read and studied
in this book, the clearer it became to me what a wretched affair it is
when the singer cannot go beyond expressing in words merely that which
he fancies he feels in his heart. But, more than this, I felt by
degrees as though I were becoming gradually linked on to higher powers,
who often sang through me, instead of its being I myself who sang,
although I was, in absolute truth, the singer at the same time. My
longing to see this great master himself, and liste