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 he 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 church-yard,” he 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 desperation, 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 overleaped all human bounds. It is a cool, wondrous alleviation that finally his blood may pour forth with the poison of the potion, with all the endless, tempestuous, lamenting, jubilating desire. They got up softly and pressed out through the glowing dust over mighty craters of tone. Outside, the spring night was cool. Leonard grew pale and his eyes shone. “In old times people opened their veins,” he muttered, “but this is a much finer way.” He edged hurriedly across Gustavus Adolphus Place and took his stand at the barrier by the river. The moon hung thin as a flower petal up in the greenish-blue heavens, whose color seemed to consist only of coolness and depth. The river rolled along pale mother-of-pearl dust. Here assuredly some one passed one day in May and was empty and sad and full of fiery moods, thought Leonard. But now he has loved and died with Tristan, so that now he hardly touches the ground, and everything is silent and all the world appears as a cool and lovely memory. Yes, what have I, Leonard the artist in wood-cuts, not experienced, seeing that I stand here with the fate of a mighty heart behind me! In this hour I feel love as a great enrapturing memory, something that lives in my soul but is not able to choke my freedom. I have come to drink the potion without its fatal poison. Verily art can give appeasement even to the most burning Now. In art is freedom!