Such a love once free can no longer be stifled or conquered. It is a formidable conflagration, a flame which death itself cannot extinguish. It has devoured everything,--loyalty, honor, virtue. The earth itself becomes effaced in the ravishing rapture of mutual possession. Infinite and sublime ecstasy follows, which no heart can have either experienced or foreseen. Their happiness even crushes and stifles them; the heart cannot contain such love, the human voice has no words to express it; the most burning embraces leave them disunited. Tristan and Isolde are two, and they would become one soul, a single thought, a scintillation of love in an unlimited night. Desperate and unsatisfied, they aspire to the infinity of death. They dream of a flight beyond all worlds in that mysterious shade which protects them upon earth, but over which the day and the empty phantoms of life triumph, ceaselessly inflicting the tortures of impending separation. The eternal and great night of love without the terrors of the morning! A long enchanting dream in unlimited space; no names to separate; a single flame; a single thought; a sweet swoon in each other's arms; the ardent rapture of death without end, without awakening! Such is their thought. But suddenly, behold the cruel day, and with it shame. This sublime love is dragged before the world, which calls it an indiscretion, and censures. Then follows the combat, in which Tristan, overcome with a divine ecstasy, is no longer the victorious hero, but falls mortally wounded.