is heart, an unsleeping Image which had impressed itself
while he was hardly aware, and lived in the chaste night there,
closely shut in. Till a ray of the Day had penetrated even so deep,
and that which was so secret and sacred that his eyes scarcely
trusted themselves to look at it, that Image, smitten by Daylight,
lay brilliantly revealed. And, Day-deluded, he had vaunted before
the whole army that which seemed to him so desirable and beautiful,
the fairest King's-bride of all the earth; and to silence the envy
and hatred which had begun to make his honours heavy to him, to
maintain his glory, he had undertaken that boldest exploit, his
quest to Ireland. "Vain slave of the Day!" Isolde calls him. She
tells her part of the story, and we are enlightened concerning
the mood in which she proffered to him the death-draught: how,
deceived she too by the Day, tortured in her love for him, she
had, while ardently loving him, hated him to the bottom of her
heart. From the light of Day, which showed him an ingrate and a
traitor, she had longed to flee, to draw him along with her into the
night, where her heart foretold an end of the mistake, a dispelling
of the apprehended delusion; to drink to him eternal love and enter
death simultaneously with him.

We learn thereupon the mood in which he accepted the cup from her.
"When I recognised the sweet draught proffered by your hand, when
intuition clearly and surely told me what it was the peace-drink
promised me, there dawned in my bosom, mild and divine, the Night--my
Day had reached its close!" In other words, when he had stood facing,
as he knew, death, all the vain shows and disguises of the Day had
melted away, he had seen for the first time clearly in his own
heart. "O hail to the draught!" he exclaims, "Hail to its sublime
magic! At the portal of death, where I quaffed it, it opened wide
to me the region where I theretofore had wandered but in dream,
the wonder-kingdom of the Night! From the Face in the innermost
shrine of the heart it dispelled the deceiving glare of the Day,
that my eyes, grown accustomed to the Night, might see it in its
truth." But the Day, she carries on the conceit with gathering
sadness, had its revenge! The Day entered into league with his
sins, and that Face which the Night had vouchsafed him to see he
had been forced to surrender to the royal power of the Day, and
behold it shining lonesomely afar, in barren magnificence. "How
have I endured it?