ave come running into the garden;
Klingsor has appeared on the threshold, armed with the Spear. This,
with the words: "The Fool shall be transfixed with his Master's
Spear!" he hurls at Parsifal. But the Spear stands miraculously
poised above the youth's head. He grasps it, with a face of ecstasy,
and draws in the air a great figure of the Cross. "By this sign
I dispel your sorceries! As this Spear shall close the wound it
made, let this lying splendour fall to wreck and desolation!" As
if shaken by an earthquake, the palace crumbles to ruin; the garden
withers away and turns to a barren waste; like broken and wilted
flowers the women are seen bestrewing the ground; Kundry falls
to earth with a great cry. And Parsifal, departing, turns on the
ruined wall for a last word to her,--painfully she lifts her head
for a last look--"You know where, only, you may see me again!"
meaning, we are left to feel, a plane sooner than a place.

III

Again the Domain of the Grail, where, on the outskirts of the forest,
beside a spring, the old-grown Gurnemanz has built himself a hermit's
cell. It is long after and much is changed. There is sadness in
the air, but it is of an unfretful gentle sort, almost sweet; the
sadness of a solitude visited by high thoughts, memories of calamity
softened in retrospect, present crosses made supportable by faith
and the light cast on the path already of an approaching event
which is to mark a new epoch in the life of the Order. A sadness
in the air and a something holy. It is Spring-time and it is
Good-Friday; the trees are in blossom and the meadow at the forest's
edge is spotted with new flowers. We are never, through the first
part of the act, left unconscious for long of the sweetness of
surrounding nature and the hour; it comes like whiffs of perfume,
every now and then, reminding us that the earth has renewed herself
and the day is holy, until at last these stray intimations have
led to a clear and rounded statement in the Good-Friday Charm.

Forth from his cell comes Gurnemanz, to be recognized as a knight
of the Grail only by the straight under-tunic of the Order. He has
heard a groan, not to be mistaken for the cry of a hurt animal.
As it is repeated, it strikes his ear as a sound known to him of
old. Anxiously searching among the matted thorn-trees, he discovers
Kundry, as once before, rigid and to all appearance dead. He chafes
and calls and brings her back to consciousness. She is the K