s death; it came again, plaintive and more
deeply plaintive, in the morning grey, when he learned his mother's
fate. And in their day, he wanderingly reflects, "when leaving an
unborn son he died; when she in dying gave me birth, the ancient
air, full of yearning and foreboding, no doubt pierced its sorrowful
way to them too,--the ancient air, which has asked me before this,
and asks me again in this hour, to what possible end, what destiny,
I was born into the world?... To what destiny?... The ancient song
tells me over again: To spend myself in longing and to die!...

"No! No!" he in a moment corrects himself, and his misery surges
back upon him in all its violence, "That is not what it says! Longing!
Longing! To spend myself in longing, not in longing to find death!
This longing which cannot die to the distant physician calls out
for the peace of death!" Confused images crowd upon him of the
beginning of this affliction. The voyage to Ireland, the wound
of which he was dying, her healing of his wound--only to open it
again; her offering him the poisoned cup which when he drank, hoping
to be cured of ills forever, a fiery charm was upon him, dooming
him never to die, but exist eternally in torture! We remember how
in the fragrant summer night and the balmy presence of Isolde he
blessed the magic draught which opened the region of all enchantment;
but in this hour, parted from her, it seems, forever, the draught
which keeps him vainly aching for her presence, which will not
let him die apart from her, or find a little rest, which makes
him a spectacle of torture for the Day to feed its eyes upon, the
draught seems to him verily no blessing. They are the bitter dregs
he is drinking now of the cup of wonder. "The dreadful draught,"
he terms it, and reaching, with the enumeration of his sufferings,
the point of cursing it, he has the flashed intuition of a truth;
by a poet's spring reaches a conclusion worthy of a philosopher:
that he, he himself is responsible for the effect upon him of the
drink. "The dreadful draught," he cries, "which devoted me to torment,
I myself, I myself, I brewed it! From my father's anguish and my
mother's woe, from the tears of love of all my life, from laughing
and weeping, joys and hurts, I furnished the poisoned ingredients
of the cup!" He had, more plainly, if we seize the sense of his
raving, fed and fostered an inherited emotional nature which made
him the cup's easy victim. And recogni