on of self. His fresh instinct has gathered the meaning
of what he sees, novel to him as it is; "wise through compassion,"
he has gotten the measure and character perfectly of Amfortas's
sufferings, foreign as they are to his experience; he has gotten
the spirit of the facts of Christ. One especial message, over and
above the rest, he has received to himself, shot into his heart
upon a ray from the glowing Grail held before his gaze by Amfortas:
that the Saviour embodied in the Grail must be delivered from the
sin-sullied hands now holding it. He has seemed to hear the appeal
of the Saviour, poignant, to be so delivered. He is left, when
the vision fades, with the sense of this necessity--involving for
himself, though he knows not how, a duty and a quest: Amfortas
must be healed, the Sacred Treasure must be taken into keeping
by purer hands.

Gurnemanz approaches him hopefully: "Well, did you understand what
you saw?" But Parsifal, still in his trance of wonder, only shakes
his head. It is too deep for words, what he has felt.

To Gurnemanz he now seems a hopeless and unprofitable fool, who
has no place in the noble company. "You are a fool, it is a fact,
and you are nothing else!" he declares. Opening a side-door, he
without further ceremony pushes him out by the shoulders, with a
sour little joke: "Take my advice: Let the swans alone hereafter,
and, gander that you are, find yourself a goose!" As he turns from
the door, there falls from above, as if some echo of it had clung
to the high dome after all the singers had left, the strain: "Wise
through compassion.... The immaculate fool...."

II

The next change of scene shows the interior of the tower where
Klingsor practises his dark arts. A strain already known catches our
attention (the Sorcery-motif), and we become aware what influences
were at work in Kundry when her weariness succumbed to the lure of
sleep, what mesmeric call from Klingsor's hotly blooming, godless
pleasure-seat. The Klingsor-music introducing the second act stands
in picturesque contrast to the tender and thoughtful music opening
the first; curiously suggesting, as it does, lawlessness, cold evil
passions riding the soul hideously at a gallop. It has something vaguely
in common with portions of the Venus-music in Tannhaeuser,--perhaps
its effect at once unbridled and joyless.

The sorcerer has from the battlements seen Parsifal approaching,
who, thrust out from the Castle of the Grail, had,