I can see, too, the jet of water that he loved playing high above the hedge of evergreen. It lulls me with its sound. "Wahnfried! Wahnfried!" it seems to murmur. It was the word written above the master's house--the word he most loved--the word his tireless spirit most believed in. How shall I render it? "Dream-life! dream-life! Earth's illusion of joy!" Great spirit! thy dream-life here is past, and, face to face with truth, "rapt from the fickle and the frail," for thee the illusion has vanished! Mayest thou also know the fulness of joy in the unbroken and serene activities of the eternal Reality! I visited the grave twice. There is nothing written on the granite slab. There were never present less than twenty persons, and a constant stream of pilgrims kept coming and going. One gentle token of the master's pitiful and tender regard for the faithful dumb animals he so loved lies but a few feet off in the same garden, and not far from his own grave. Upon a mossy bank, surrounded with evergreens, is a small marble slab, with this inscription to his favorite dog: "_Here lies in peace 'Wahnfried's' faithful watcher and friend--the good and beautiful Mark_" (der gute, schoene Mark)! I returned, too, to Wagner's tomb, plucked a branch of the fir-tree that waved above it, and went back to my room to prepare myself by reading and meditation for the great religious drama which I was to witness at four o'clock in the afternoon--Wagner's latest and highest inspiration--the story of the sacred brotherhood, the knights of San Graal--_Parsifal_! PARSIFAL The blood of God!--mystic symbol of divine life--"for the blood is the life thereof." That is the key-note of _Parsifal_, the Knight of the Sangrail. Wine is the ready symbolical vehicle--the material link between the divine and the human life. In the old religions, that heightened consciousness, that intensity of feeling produced by stimulant, was thought to be the very entering in of the "god"--the union of the divine and human spirit; and in the Eleusinian mysteries, the "sesame," the bread of Demeter, the earth mother, and the "kykeon," or wine of Dionysos, the vine god, were thus sacramental. The passionate desire to approach and mingle with Deity is the one mystic bond common to all religions in all lands. It is the "cry of the human;" it traverses the ages, it exhausts many symbols and transcends all forms. To the Christian it is summed up in the "Lord's Supper." The medieval legend of the Sangrail (real or royal blood) is the most poetic and pathetic form of transubstantiation; in it the gross materialism of the Roman Mass almost ceases to be repulsive; it possesses the true legendary power of attraction and assimilation.