thee, joined everlastingly, to death I doom'd
thee."

The second act leads them further and further into the coils of their
love; they are more and more convinced that death alone is left to them,
step by step they discover the secret of the mystical union--and yet
they are still completely imprisoned within the limits of their
personalities and cannot quite understand the miracle: "How to grasp it,
how to grasp it, this great gladness, far from daylight, far from
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
o