Lohengrin is, perhaps, the most perfect of the three lyric dramas which form the second period in the master's work. From Lohengrin to Tristan and Isolde as great a distance is marked as between Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman. It is a new revelation, a new art,--something perfect and definite, a prodigious flight toward the future. There is no longer, so to speak, any question of music in the sense formerly attached to this word; it is poetry in superb and precise form, with a sonorous resonant soul,--Apollo and Orpheus melted in a single lyre. The works following may, perhaps, be grander, but Tristan and Isolde is and will remain the masterpiece of masterpieces, by reason of the poetical subject which, in art as in the human soul, takes by right the first place. In Tristan and Isolde love itself, in its most complete and perfect form, finds utterance. The most pointed phases of the passion are pushed to their extreme. In the first act it is unavailing love, heroically conquered, which consumes the heart while not a cry escapes the lips,--Tristan, conducting toward another the royal betrothed, whose hand he himself, in his blind love, has solicited for the King of Cornwall. Tristan's love believes itself despised. Isolde, consumed with anger and tenderness, powerless to master the tumult in her soul, wishes shipwreck to the vessel which bears her away, with the hero who disdains her, toward the shore which she hopes never to reach. "Death rather, death for us both!" she cries. And when the tempest betrays her, when already the hated land is signaled, she offers poison. Tristan cannot refuse to empty a cup in Isolde's honor, to drink to their reconciliation, for a debt of blood lies between them, long since effaced by their unavowed love, but which she begins to remember. Tristan well knows that eternal forgetfulness is poured out for him by the hand which he secretly adores; he accepts with gratitude this mitigation of evils which have no remedy. On the threshold of death, however, both drop their mask, the fire then breaks out triumphant, love casts them into one another's arms in the intoxication of a supreme joy which should repay them for their past sufferings. Heart against heart, eyes looking into eyes, thus will their hearts cease to beat, and their mutual gaze be extinguished. But alas! they are betrayed; the two devoted followers have substituted for the mortal draught a love-drink, and instead of the kindly shade which reunited them, behold the detested shore, and the deceitful day which separates them.