Isolde is beautiful, winsome, desirable. Men love her, but she does not dominate. Brünnhilde grows from a laughing light-elf to be a stricken woman, and thence is raised by the might of love to the majestic height of abstract womanhood divine. Isolde is a diminuendo; Brünnhilde a crescendo. In her last estate she stands disclosed in overmastering splendor, and mortal man in the honesty of his secret heart knows that, in the presence of such womanhood as this, he is utterly unworthy. And so we come to the end. Brünnhilde has joined hands with Loge and the "Rheingold" prophecy of Erda is fulfilled. The spirit of evil has become the renovator of the earth and all things are purified by fire. And the music! What majestic development of the Erda theme is this we hear in the Dusk of the Gods motive? There, indeed, is a psychological development, equalled only by the extraordinary mystic effects of the combination in Act I. of the themes of forgetfulness and the tarnhelm, by the wonderful recitative of the transformed Siegfried posing as Gunther, and by that highest of all songs without words, the funeral march. The retirement of the futile and disappearing gods forces the purely human element to the front. The tragedy steadily waxes in power as the feeble ones of Walhalla grow fainter and the humans take the threads in their hands, till finally the one great, majestic creation of the whole trilogy is seen to be Brünnhilde, the eternal womanhood personified, the light of the world and the glory of Walhalla. ISOLDE'S SERVING-WOMAN The daughter of debate, That discord aye doth sowe. _Verses by Queen Elizabeth in_ PERCY'S _Reliques_. It is an inquiring age. We investigate the domestic habits of the poet or the sandpiper with equal zest. We analyze dress and intellectual states with the keenest delight. Upon all things we speculate, ponder, ring the changes of scrutinizing comment. Thus it chanced upon a day that certain learned Thebans, sitting in the solemn conclave of educational chop-houses, fell upon disputatious views of the profound character of Brangäne in Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," and there were diverse theories. Strange it seems to the calm and unprejudiced observer that there should be difference of opinion as to the character of Brangäne. To be sure, the weary mind of the hardened critic never hopes to receive highly intelligent views on such questions from casual or even habitual opera-goers. When this writer presumed to object to the richness of Edyth Walker's costume as Brangäne, he was told that the woman was of noble birth and that she was not Isolde's maid, but her companion. Also he was told that Miss Walker's costume was approved in Vienna, which concerned him not a jot, seeing that the authority for the interpretation of Brangäne does not rest in Vienna, but in the poem of Wagner.