te their entreaties, when
Wolfram pronounces the name which brings him to an instantaneous
standstill. "Remain beside Elizabeth!"--"Elizabeth!" Tannhaeuser
repeats after him, reverently as if the name were consecrated bread
upon his lips; "Oh, power of Heaven, is it you calling that sweet
name to me?" At the spectacle of his emotion, Wolfram turns to
the Landgrave: "Have I your leave, my lord, to be the herald to
him of his good fortune?" The Landgrave consents. "Inform him of
the magic spell he has wrought, and may God lend him virtue to
loose it worthily!" Wolfram imparts to Henry then that when in the
days before his disappearance the minstrels were wont to contend
with him in song, whatever the event of the contest, one prize there
had been won by him alone, his song alone had had power to enthrall
the interest of that most virtuous maid, Elizabeth. And when he had
proudly withdrawn from their midst, her heart had closed to the
singing of the remaining minstrels; her cheek had lost bloom, she
had shunned their song-tourneys. "Return to us, O daring minstrel,"
Wolfram concludes, "let your song resound alongside of ours, that
she may no longer be absent from our festivals, that her star once
more may shed brightness upon us!" The fellow-minstrels join their
voices to Wolfram's, to press the recovered companion to remain
among them. "Let discord and quarrel be laid aside! Let our songs
form one harmony! As brothers regard us henceforward!"

Great gladness has fallen upon the knight, crushed to earth a moment
past by a sense of sin; a swift rebound lifts up the heart that had
asked of this fair and over-fair world just restored to him only
opportunity to expiate and be made clean. Can this be true, this which
seems like the most madly impossible of beautiful dreams? Elizabeth!
the Landgrave's niece, the fair and faultless, the saint!... No
doubt in the old days he had worshipped her, not daring to lift
his eyes above her footprints, had loved as a moth may a star.
That lily had shone in his dreams, cool and pure and unattainable,
by the mysterious attraction of opposites compelling homage and
desire more than might any being less removed in nature from his
hot, pleasure-thirsty, sense-ridden, undisciplined self. An element
in his discontent with the earth had been perhaps his sense of
life-wide separation from her, of unsurpassable barriers between
them, the vanity of aspiration. And now the Landgrave permits her
name