We are given a night scene of magical beauty—yet how different from the usual banal operatic assignation. In an old-time, Old-World forest a man and a woman have revealed their souls; sobbing in the distance is the soft horn music of the kingly hunt. Now it is love against the world, the relentless instinct that mocks at conventional gyves. Was ever such an enchanting romance sung? The very moonlight seems melodious. After the storm and stress of the first act this scene recalls Heine’s This is the Fairy Wood of Old. Wagner’s philosophy should concern us but little; his music is his metaphysic; its beauty and dramatic significance are worth tomes of his theories. There is the superb web and woof of this tonal tapestry, the most eloquent orchestra that ever stormed or sighed; there is every accent and nuance of human speech, faithfully reproduced; and above all there hovers the imagination of the poet-composer. These thematic nuggets, these motives of love and death, which paint the lives of his men and women—are they not wonderfully conceived, wonderfully developed? Berlioz it was who confessed that the prelude to this music-drama proved ever an enigma to him. Wagner’s melodic curves of intensity mirror the soul’s perturbations. He is poet of passion, a master of thrilling tones, a magician who everywhere finds willing thralls. And the music—how it searches the nerves. How it throws into the background, because of its intensity, all the love lays ever penned by mortal composer! How it appeals to the intellect with its exalted realism! This music is not for those who admire the pink prettiness of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. It is music that would have been loved by that “fierce and splendid old man,” Walter Savage Landor, by Shelley, by Byron and Walt Whitman—the latter once confessed to me his love for Wagner; “it makes my old bones sweeter,” he said—but it would not have been admired by Wordsworth or Tennyson. Swinburne adores Wagner almost as much as he adores the sea, and he sings the praise of both with an absence of reserve that recalls the _mot_ of Vauvenargues: “To praise moderately is always a sign of mediocrity.” Yet in Tristan and Isolde are the seeds of the morbid, the hysterical, and the sublimely erotic—hall marks of most great modern works of art. And there is, too, the _Katharsis_ of Aristotle, the purification by pity and terror. This dominating tragic principle places the drama within the category of the classic.