to him, and this sitting up late of his
master's interferes with his slipping over to her for an explanation.
Sachs takes his seat before the work-table, sets his materials
aright, but having done it, instead of falling to work, leans back
and lets the sweetness of the evening beguile him, dreams possess
and waft him whither they will. That haunting strain from Walther's
song, repeated slowly, as by one savouring it with pensive pleasure,
again sings itself to his inward ear; it, indeed, is partly to
blame for his mood of gentle unrest. The memory will not let him
alone of that marvellous, that unprecedented experience of the
afternoon. Unreservedly the grey-haired man's homage flies to the
youngling who so easily outstrips them all, with their inveterate
painstaking, their multitudinous canons. Not only without a shade
of bitterness but with a tender elation, he lives over again the
emotions created in him by that passionate song. To his true poet's
heart it is a matter for exultation that just something beautiful
should have been, and he there to witness and rejoice. He reconsiders
it all with affectionate disquisition, fresh delight in every point.
If just a shade of sadness belongs to the hour, it lies in the
recognition that though the vision of beauty has by the contagion
that is proper to it stimulated in him the impulse to be at once
producing, he too, beautiful things, not by any longing could he,
after a life of faithful effort in the service of Poesy, produce
anything to compare with the unprepared effusion of that youth!

In the serenity of the lovely evening his thoughts breathe themselves
forth upon the scented June air: "What fragrance--how mild, how
sweet, how abundant,--exhaled from the elder-tree! Its soft spell
loosens my fibres, solicits me to seek expression for my thoughts.
To what purpose, any expression of mine? A poor, simple fellow
am I! Little in the mood for work as I am, you had best, friend,
let me alone! Far wiser I should attend to my leather and desist
altogether from poetry!" Resolutely he falls to work. But Friend
Elder-tree does not therefore cease to shed scent. It casts its
spell over him again almost at once. "No, there is no use in trying
to work!" Sachs leans back and listens again to the echo in his
memory of Walther's song. "I feel it," he meditates, lending ear
to the persistent voice in his brain, "and cannot understand it.
I cannot retain it--nor yet can forget it! And if f