nly triumphantly verified many years afterward. Like many of
the mediaeval legends, the story of Tannhaeuser is connected with
the ancient Teutonic religion, which declared that Holda, the
Northern Venus, had set up her enchanted abode in the hollow
mountain known as the Hoerselberg, where she entertained her
devotees with all the pleasures of love. When the missionaries
came preaching Christianity, they diligently taught the people
that all these heathen divinities were demons, and although
Holda and her court were not forgotten, she became a type of
sensual love. Tannhaeuser, a minstrel of note, who has won many
prizes for his songs, hearing of the wondrous underground palace
and of its manifold charm, voluntarily enters the mountain, and
abandons himself to the fair goddess's wiles. Here he spends
a whole year in her company, surrounded by her train of loves
and nymphs, yielding to all her enchantments, which at first
intoxicate his poetic and beauty loving soul.

But at last the sensual pleasures in which he has been steeped
begin to pall upon his jaded senses. He longs to tear himself
away from the enchantress, and to return to the mingled pleasure
and pain of earth.

The first scene of the opera represents the charmed grotto where
Venus gently seeks to beguile the discontented knight, while
nymphs, loves, bacchantes, and lovers whirl about in the graceful
mazes of the dance, or pose in charming attitudes. Seeing
Tannhaeuser's abstraction and evident sadness, Venus artfully
questions him, and when he confesses his homesickness, and his
intense longing to revisit the earth, she again tries to dazzle
him, and cast a glamour over all his senses, so as to make him
utterly oblivious of all but her.

Temporarily intoxicated by her charms, Tannhaeuser, when called
upon to tune his lyre, bursts forth into a song extolling her
beauty and fascination; but even before the lay is ended the
longing to depart again seizes him, and he passionately entreats
her to release him from her thrall:--

''Tis freedom I must win or die,--
For freedom I can all defy;
To strife or glory forth I go,
Come life or death, come joy or woe,
No more in bondage will I sigh!
O queen, beloved goddess, let me fly!'

Thus adjured, and seeing her power is temporarily ended, Venus
haughtily dismisses her slave, warning him that he returns to
earth in vain, as he has forfeited all chance of salvation by
lingering with her,