Norand's terrible disclosure. Millo quits her in despair, and, filled with horror and grief, careless of living longer, she stabs herself with the dagger. As soon as her blood besprinkles the statue Gennaro comes back to life. Millo comes: he sees his brother alive, and his bride lying slain. In his despair he is going to stab himself with the dagger; but the gloomy dungeon changes to a great, illuminated hall; Norand appears: all the mysterious decrees of fate are accomplished, all the sorrow is past. Norand touches Armilla. She comes back to life, and everything ends happily.' "_Ferdinand_. 'Yes; I remember this fine, imaginative tale quite well, and the impression it made upon me. You are quite right; this is an instance in which the Marvellous takes the form of an essential element, and has so much poetical verity that we believe it without hesitation. Millo's killing of the raven is what knocks at the brazen gates of the Spirit-Realm; on that they fly open with a clash, and the spirits come swooping in upon the human life, and immesh the mortals in the web of strange, mysterious destiny which impends over them.' "_Ludwig_. 'Exactly; and notice the grand, powerful situations which the poet has evolved from this contest with the spirit-world. Gennaro's self-sacrifice; Armilla's deed of heroism; there is a grandeur in them which our "moral" playwrights, in their rummagings among the paltrinesses of every-day life (like sweepings of drawing-rooms thrown out into the dust-bin) haven't the slightest idea of; and then the comic parts for the masks are must effectively woven in.' "_Ferdinand_. 'Yes it is only in the Romantic Drama that the comic element blends on such perfectly equal terms with the tragic that they contribute with equality to the general effect.' "_Ludwig_. Even common opera-manufacturers have got hold of some dim notion of that, for it is thence that the so-called Comic-Heroic operas take their origin--productions in which the Heroic is often exceedingly Comic, and the Comic is so far Heroic that it most heroically ignores all the requirements of taste and propriety.' "_Ferdinand_. 'According to your notion of the essentials of opera, we can't congratulate ourselves on possessing very many.'