om I must fare. Oh, Queen, Goddess,
let me depart!"

Reproachful questions succeed on her part: Of what neglect has her
love been guilty, of what can he accuse her? In reply, grasping
his harp again, he adds fiery praise to praise of her greatness,
the wonders of her kingdom,--to drop again into his prayer for
release: "But I, amid these rosy perfumes, I yearn for the odour
of the forest, yearn for the pure blue of our skies, the fresh
green of our sward, the sweet song of our birds, the dear sound of
our bells! Forth from your kingdom I must fare. O Queen, Goddess,
let me depart!"

The beautiful queen's surprise is turning to anger, without ceasing
to be surprise. "You sing the praise of my love, and wish at the
same time to flee from it? My beauty, is it possible, has brought
surfeit?" He tells her, disarmingly as he may, what must fall
incomprehensibly on her pagan ears, that it is that over-great
beauty of hers he must shun, that never was his love greater, never
sincerer, than in this moment when he must flee from her forever.

She drops chiding then, truly alarmed, and tempts. She paints to
him with glowing art the delights awaiting them; to these she bids
him with the persuasive voice of love. When the goddess of beauty thus
invites a mortal, she feels secure in counting upon his forgetting
all else. But this Tannhaeuser, with the dreamy echo in his earth-born
ears of the church-bells of home, he catches, instead of her beautiful
form to his breast, his harp again. He grants that her beauty is
the source of all beauty, that every lovely marvel has its origin
in her: against the whole world, he promises, he will thereafter
be her champion, but--back to the world of earth go he must, for
here he can but become a slave. Freedom, for freedom he thirsts!
Battle and struggle he must have, though he should meet through
them defeat and death. Forth from her kingdom he must fare! Queen,
Goddess, let him depart!

"Go, then, madman, go!" she bids him in lovely wrath. "Traitor,
see, I do not hold you back! I leave you free, go your way, go
your way! Let your doom be to have that which you yearn for! Go
back to cold mankind, before whose gross dismal delusion we Gods
of Joy fled deep into the warm bosom of the earth. Go back to them,
infatuated! Seek your soul's welfare and find it never! Not long
before your proud heart will surrender. I shall see you humbly
draw near. Broken, trampled, you will come seeking me, will i