marvelous!" It aims only at the
accomplishment of its object. It has at heart only our ever wandering
and suffering race. Those who judged without prejudice tell us that
this "Parsifal" appeared to them as a mode of divine worship, and that
the festival-play-house was not only no longer a theatre, but that even
all evil demons had been banished from this edifice, and all good ones
summoned within its walls. Would that this were so, and that we could
hope in the future that the painful and severe trials of the artist's
long life, which gave to this genius also "compassion's supreme
strength and purest wisdom's power," would be blessed with abundant
fruit, with the full measure of consummation of his own hopes, and
the goal so ardently struggled for attained, for his as well as for
our own welfare.

However this may be, and whatever the future may have in store for us,
this "Parsifal" is a call to the nation grander than any one has
uttered before. It was foreordained, and could only be accomplished by
an art which is the most unmixed product of that culture originating
with Christianity; more, it is a product of the religious emotions of
humanity itself. Just as our master said of Beethoven's grand art,
that it had rescued the human soul from deep degradation, so no artist
after him has presented this supreme and purest spirit of our nation
as sanctified and strengthened by Christianity, purer and clearer
than he who had already confessed in early years that he could not
understand the spirit of music otherwise than as love! With "Parsifal"
he has created for us a new period of development, which is to lead us
deeper into our own hearts and to a purer humanity, and thereby give
us possibly the strength to overcome everything false and foreign
which has found its way into our life, and elevate us to a sense of
the real object and goal of life.

Richard Wagner, more than any other contemporary, as we conceive, has
re-awakened in the sphere of the intellectual life of his German
people its inborn feeling for the grand and profound, for the pure and
the sublime--in one word, for the ideal. May we who follow prove this
in life by gratefully welcoming this grand deed! Then Lohengrin, who
sought the wife that believed in him, need not again return to his
dreary solitude. He will be forever relieved of his longing for union
with the heart of his people. Then too it can be said of him, this
genius who throughout a long life "i