s if he were there in front of her. He
looked smaller than he really was, dwarfed, apparently, by illness, and
by the wrack of pain. His huge head, the head of a genius, was bent low
over the bosom of his wife Cosima. He had removed the black felt hat so
as to catch the afternoon breeze full upon his loose gray locks. His
broad, high curved forehead, seemed to weigh down upon his body like an
ivory chest laden full of unseen jewels. His arrogant nose, as strong as
the beak of a bird of prey, seemed to be reaching across the sunken
mouth toward the sensuous, powerful jaw. A gray beard ran down along the
neck, that was wrinkled, wasted with age. A hasty vision it had been, to
be sure; but she had seen him; and his venerable figure remained in her
memory like a landscape glimpsed at the flare of a lightning-flash. She
had witnessed his arrival in Venice to die in the peace of those canals,
in that silence which is broken only by the stroke of the oar--where
many years before he had thought himself dying as he wrote his
_Tristan_--that hymn to the Death that is pure, to the Death that
liberates! She saw him stretched out in the dark boat; and the splash of
the water against the marble of the palaces echoed in her imagination
like the wailing, thrilling trumpets at the burial of Siegfried--the
hero of Poetry marching to the Valhalla of immortality and glory upon a
shield of ebony--motionless, inert as the young hero of the Germanic
legend--and followed by the lamentations of that poor prisoner of life,
Humanity, that ever eagerly seeks a crack, a chink, in the wall about
it, through which the inspiriting, comforting ray of beauty may
penetrate.

And the singer gazed with tearful eyes at the broad _boina_ of black
velvet, the lock of gray hair, two broken, rusty steel pens--souvenirs
of the Master, that Hans Keller had piously preserved in a glass case.

"You knew him--tell me how he lived. Tell me everything: talk to me
about the Poet ... the Hero."

And the musician, no less moved, described the Master as he had seen him
in the best of health; a small man, tightly wrapped in an
overcoat--with a powerful, heavy frame, however, despite his slight
stature--as restless as a nervous woman, as vibrant as a steel spring,
with a smile that lightly touched with bitterness his thin, colorless
lips. Then came his "genialities," as people said, the caprices of his
genius, that figure so largely in the Wagner legend: his smoker, a
ja