With every year the festival of the four dramas is celebrated in the metropolis of the New World. Parsifalian orgies are new, and the wine of the holy cup offers a novel intoxication to restless spirits ever seeking fresh excitements. But your good, honest, old Wagnerite goes yearly to gape in awestruck silence at the majesty of the "wildered" Wotan, and to bask in the sunshine of Siegfried's radiant youth. Whistle your Last Supper motive, you Monsalvationer, if you will, as you crunch your lobster salad after the celebration, but we old-time Wagnerites, who have hunted with the pack since first the "flight" theme pulsated across the world, we shall trot home murmuring the slumber motive and lay us down to pleasant dreams with a final sigh of Fafner's "Lass't mich schlafen." Perhaps this is a good time to review our impressions of that wonderful creation of a strange genius, "Der Ring des Nibelungen." Whatever else may be said of Wagner, it must always be admitted that he was a genius. Something of the vanity of the child, the naïveté that always dwells in the organization of the truly original artist, is to be discerned in his every action, in his every utterance; and it would be strange if it did not force itself upon our notice in his works. There it discloses itself most frequently in a ludicrous error of taking seriously things that can never be other than amusing to the casual observer, and of missing the point of some of his own best ideas. Wagner has been much praised as a poet. Time was when the present writer (who must be his own confessor), feeling the power and beauty of the fundamental stuff in the music dramas, rather than the adapter's cumbersome and rudely articulated Germanizing of it, dreamed that Wagner had poetic craftsmanship of no mean order. But he never fell into the error of regarding him as a brother of the northern skalds, a bard chanting in full-blooded imagination. Wagner was a dramatist, of an uncommonly high order, if you will, looking always to the symbolism of musical investure for his stage pictures, but just a dramatist and nothing more. His truest drama, as it is his most finely wrought, is "Tristan und Isolde," which rests upon the simplest of emotional propositions, demonstrated in the most convincing of musical illustration. But "Der Ring des Nibelungen" is his most ponderous conception, his most elaborate structure, and withal second only to "Tristan und Isolde" in the majestic heights of musical delineation to which it triumphantly ascends.