nvoke
the wonders of my power!" Unheedful of the remainder, he seizes
avidly upon his dismissal. "Ah, lovely goddess, farewell! Never
will I return!" What--never return? She threatens with her curse,
if he shall not return, him and the whole human race: in vain let
them go seeking for her miracles, let the world become a wilderness
and have for its hero a slave! But yet--he cannot have meant what
he said, he will come back, let him say that he will come back!
"Nevermore!" cries the captive of this suffocating prison-house
of love, as he pants upon the threshold of freedom, "nevermore let
joy of love delight me!"--"Come back" she desperately entreats,
"when your heart impels you!"--"Forever your beloved flees!"--"Come
back when the whole world rejects you!"--"Through penance I shall
be absolved from sin!"--"Never shall you gain forgiveness! Come
back if the gates of salvation close to you!"--"Salvation!... My
hope of salvation lies in the Blessed Mary!"

At that name, Venus uttering a cry vanishes, and with her the dim-lit
subterranean kingdom....

Tannhaeuser finds himself standing in a sunny well-known valley,
near to a road-side shrine of the Blessed Mary at whose hem he
had caught. The Wartburg is in sight, where he was used in former
days to take part in song-tournaments. In dim distance looms the
Hoerselberg, concerning which a sinister rumour ran: that in the heart
of it the pagan goddess Venus still lived and held her court. All the
landscape smiles, the trees are in blossom, nature is altogether at
her loveliest. Oh, so sweeter to the ears of the resuscitated knight
than the song of sirens, comes the homely tinkle of sheepbells.
A little shepherd pipes and sings in joy over the return of May.

Tannhaeuser stands statue-still, as if he feared by the slightest
movement to wake himself, to dispel the vision.

A band of penitents, starting on a pilgrimage to far-off Rome,
defile past the Virgin's shrine, saluting her and asking her grace
upon their pilgrimage. Their pious chant stirs in Tannhaeuser deep,
long-untouched chords. At the same moment that the aroused sense
of pollution would overwhelm him, the reminder shines forth to
him in the pilgrims' words of the possibility of forgiveness and
regeneration through repentance and penitential practices. A very
miracle of God's grace it seems to him, by which he sees the door
of hope open to him anew. The weight of his emotion forces him
to his knees; he makes hi