suicide, and when they--almost accidentally--heard of
this mutual intention, they conceived the idea of the new voluptuousness
of a common death. Love did not play a very great part in this. Kleist
further says in the same letter: "Her resolution to die with me drew me,
I cannot tell you with what unspeakable and irresistible power, into her
arms. Do you remember that I asked you more than once to die with me.
But you always said 'No.'" From this and other passages it is clear that
Kleist would have taken his life in any case, and that he only seized
this specific opportunity to plunge into the ecstasy of a common death.

The thought of the love-death is often present in the hearts of
individuals who are genuinely in love. We read in Schlegel's _Lucinda_:
"There (in a transcendental life) our longings may perhaps be
satisfied." And in Lenau's letters to Sophy the same thought is more
than once apparent.

The idea reached perfection and immortality in Wagner's "Tristan and
Isolde." It is Wagner's world-famous deed to have lived through and
embodied this complex of emotion for the first, and so far for the last
time; his lovers are in a superlative degree representative of human
love; they typify the climaxes of human emotion. Wagner has immortalised
the metaphysical form of synthetic love; his importance to synthetic
love surpasses Dante's importance to deification.

Already in the first act the exchange of love-potion and death-draught
is profoundly significant: both Tristan and Isolde seek death because
they are alarmed by the external obstacles to their love. But the
thought of death and love, the foreboding that their love can find rest
only in the ultimate, in finality, has been in their hearts from the
outset. Together they receive new life from love, and together love
leads them, step by step, to death. In the profoundest sense no exchange
of potions has taken place, but the power of the love-potion has made
them conscious of what was latent in their souls, waiting to burst into
life. At the very moment when Isolde proffers Tristan the death-draught,
the conviction flashes into his soul that she is giving him death
through love: "When thy dear hand the goblet raised, I recognised that
death thou gav'st." And in the same way Isolde: "From golden day I
sought to flee, in darkest night draw thee with me, where my heart
divined the end of deceit, where illusion's haunting dream should fade,
to drink eternal love to