[Illustration: Some bars of music]

it is the announcement of her determination that death for both of them
shall end an impossible situation. This, however, we do not learn until
later; for the moment the theme conveys little special meaning to us. It
is when we hear the drama a second time that its appalling tragic force
is felt. Isolda tells Brangaena to command Tristan to come to the
pavilion. Kurvenal, his servant, sings a scoffing song, in which all the
sailors join, in spite of Tristan's endeavour to stop them. Brangaena
rushes back and hurriedly closes the curtains. Isolda, half-crazed,
tells the whole story as it occurred previous to the rising of the
curtain--how she nursed the wounded Tristan, found him to be the slayer
of her betrothed, took his sword and was about to kill him, when he
opened his eyes, and the sword dropped from her listless fingers.
Brangaena is sufficiently astonished; Isolda works herself up into a
paroxysm of fury; and now the drama is indeed on foot. Brangaena has a
long, lovely, soothing passage to sing, and in her over-anxiety to serve
her mistress she accidentally suggests to Isolda the very means of
revenging herself on Tristan, and terminating at the same time her own
misery. "You remember your mother's art," says Brangaena: "do you think
she would have sent me over-seas with you without a means of helping
you?" Isolda knows it is the love-potion she means. She has only to
drink the contents of a small flask, and old King Mark will become at
least tolerable to her. The flask is in a casket, and another is there,
as Isolda knows, full of a deadly poison. She commands Brangaena to pour
out the poison. Brangaena, terrified, beseeches, implores; but Isolda
insists; and in the midst of the dispute the sailors suddenly roar out
their "Yo-heave-ho!" The sea had ceased, as it will in moments of
preoccupation or intense emotion, to haunt our ears for a time; now it