s of perfume! They softly surge and murmur around her....
She is in wonder whether to inhale, or to listen, or drink and
be immersed and yield up the breath sweetly amid perfumes.... Ah,
yes, in the billowing surge, in the great harmony, in the breath
of the spheres, to sink under, to drown, to be lost... that, that
will be the supreme ecstasy!... As the mysterious experiences she
describes absorb her soul, her body sinks softly upon Tristan's.
Mark extends his hands in blessing over the dead.

And so the curtain fans on this wonderful and moving drama, and
the thousands scatter in an exalted mood, impressed once more with
the incomprehensible loveliness of love. The point of fascination
of this work does not lie surely in any celebration of enviable
joys, or sorrows nearly as enviable; it is not that it is spiritual,
which would strengthen its appeal for some, neither that it is
sensuous, which would make it alluring to others; it is that it
breathes love,--love, indefinable but unmistakable, mysterious but
absolute, understood of all, explainable by none, and of greater,
or at least more universal, interest than any other emotion. Those
equally fitted to enjoy all Wagner's operas show, it is observed,
a predilection usually for Tristan and Isolde. If the pre-eminent
beauty of the music accounts for this, the fact suggests none the
less that Wagner could reach his utmost eloquence on the theme. It
is as if the composer had wished for once a fair field to render
all he felt and understood of love, and so had chosen a story in
which it moves free from ordinary trammels and is permitted an
intensity more prolonged, more fervid deeps, languors more abandoned,
than love in the shackles of thought and will.

A thing which must not be forgotten. The love of Tristan and Isolde
is not to be brought under the head of what is vulgarly termed a
guilty love. We have seen how Mark learning the secret of the potion
instantly and completely exonerated them and rejoiced that he could
return to his faith in Tristan. We know little of love-potions, and
had best forget such attempts at rational explanation of them as
we may have read, accepting the old story as it is offered, with
its cup of magic by which all struggle against the power of love
became vain. The lovers must be regarded as essentially innocent.
The language of their hearts is always perfectly noble, their music
is never sultry.

It seems to matter less, in the case of