In the first act of _The Blue Bird_, the fairy Bérylune sends Mytyl and Tyltyl in search of happiness. Shepherded and protected by Light, they explore the Past and the Future, the Palace of Night, the Kingdoms of the Dead and of the Unborn. At one moment they find themselves in a graveyard; and Mytyl grows fearful at her first contact with the great mystery of Death. Yet the graveyard with its wooden crosses and grass-covered mounds is moonlit and tranquil; and of a sudden, as the revealing diamond is turned in Tyltyl’s fingers, even the tombstones and ‘all the grand investiture of death’ disappear, to be replaced by luxuriant, swaying clusters of Madonna lilies. “Where are the dead?” asks Mytyl, in amazement, searching in the grass for traces of even one tombstone. Her brother also looks: “There are no dead,” is his reply. Any one who was present on the first night of the play at the Haymarket Theatre, in 1909, will not easily forget the audience’s little gasp of delighted surprise. Yet the two lines of dialogue were more than a stage effect, more than an aspect of mysticism; almost they may be regarded as the essence of Maeterlinck’s later work. Since the _Life of the Bee_, since the earlier essays and such pure drama as _Monna Vanna_, _The Blind_ and _Pelléas and Mélisande_, his mind seems to have been brooding more and more on the part which Death, the great twin mystery of the world, plays in the life of man and of the race. In _The Death of Tintagiles_ there is a barred and studded door, through which, for all its studs and bars, there steals a miasma of dread. And, when the door opens, it is to release a spirit of annihilation which the concerted efforts of Tintagiles’ sisters can neither restrain nor force back. In _The Blue Bird_ we are shown that a man cannot die so long as he dwells in the memory of those who loved him. In his latest work Maeterlinck gives to the dead an objective existence. In part each generation survives its own death and transmits to its successors the heritage of aspiration and achievement, of knowledge and passion, which it has received from its predecessors; in greater part the objective existence is founded on new modes of communication, a new study of psychic relationship and a new belief in a subliminal state.