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1' IIE A M E R / C A N - S C A N I) IN A VIA N R E VIE TV 
rent. Heavy, bottomless well of tone—dark purple, restlessly driving 
waves, which now and then break into foam with a cry. 
O thou spirit’s 
Highest, maddest 
Exquisite burning joy! 
Love rescued from the cold glance of day—night without morning 
—yearning for death—the world’s redemption through passionate 
ecstasy! 
Quiet our trembling. 
Sweetest death. 
With yearning awaited, 
Oh love-blent Death! 
And so on to the end—the sinister dawn with the chill spectres of 
day, the discovery, the crossed blades and Tristan’s wound. 
Such things are too much for a poor lonely and hungry artist on 
a lovely evening in May. 
“The deuce is in it,” he muttered, “the very deuce! Why after 
that should a poor devil sit and carve in wood?” 
But Lundstrom sat with his chin on his hand and gazed out of the 
distance, paying hardly any attention to Leonard’s violent gestures. 
The old man’s shadow was outlined on a blue background, large, vague, 
as though ready to merge in the dimness of the thousand recesses 
around it. 
Leonard was no longer interested in him, he would have preferred 
to be alone. Pshaw! the poor old codger hasn’t a notion of what is 
seething down there, he thought. He’s just moidering around with 
old stage properties. But thereupon Lundstrom lifted his gray head 
and said something which indicated that lie nevertheless could fish 
memories out of the stream of tone. 
“Sometimes when I sit here I get to be with them that lie out in 
the churchyard,” lie muttered. “Wife and children and friends. It s 
as if the music rinsed one out inside. Everything gets clearer and one 
sees that what’s been is still.” 
“I see only what will never come to pass in life for my part, and 
that’s a cursed lot different,” burst out Leonard with greater bitterness 
than he himself realized. In his heat he was constrained to use strong 
words. But in reality he felt the beginning of a relaxation and release. 
Then came the third act. 
Tristan lies in feverish dreams by the shore of the sea. He waits 
for his Isolde. But when she finally comes, he, in the wild joy of des¬ 
peration, tears open his unhealed wound and bleeds to death before it 
is vouchsafed him to kiss her. So, too, it had to be. Passion has over¬ 
leaped all human bounds. It is a cool, wondrous alleviation that finally 
