he vision of the
Grail, and that the Saviour had seemed to speak from it to his
inmost soul: "Deliver me! Save me from sin-polluted hands!" "And
I," he groans, "the fool! the coward! I could rush to the insensate
exploits of a boy!"

Kundry has been amazed and somewhat alarmed, but for a moment still,
as it appears, has not understood. She leaves her flowery couch
and approaches Parsifal, where he is kneeling in supplication to
the Lord of Mercy; with soft arts she attempts to reconquer his
attention, but with an effect wide of her expectation, for, while
she plies him with caresses, he is thinking, and we hear him think:
"Yes, that voice, even thus it fell upon his ear.... And that glance,
I recognise it clearly, which smiled away his peace.... So the
lip trembled for him. ... So the throat arched.... So the tresses
laughingly gleamed!... So the soft cheek pressed close against
his own,... and so, in league with all the sorrows, so her mouth
kissed away his soul's salvation!" As if the reinforcements from
Heaven, which he prayed, had suddenly reached him, he rises in
inspired strength, frees himself and thrusts her resolutely from
him: "Destroyer, away from me! Forever and ever away!"

From this onward he is a different Parsifal, not in the least a
boy any more. It is as if in the storm which swept him he had found
himself, his anchorage and his strength. And now we gather that
Kundry really has had an inkling of what is at work in him. She
drops at once the fairly simple methods she has up to this used, and,
it is not quite clear at first whether still as a mighty Huntress,
discarding one weapon and taking another better adapted to bring
down the quarry, or at last in true earnest, she invokes--pressing,
not to be denied--his pity. She reveals--and it is as if beauty and
splendour should lift the veil from a hidden ulcer--her strange
history, the ancient sin, the curse upon her, the despair that is
denied tears and can only voice itself in laughter. "Since your
heart is capable only of feeling the sorrows of others," she pleads,
"feel mine!" In him, as he has become within the hour, she recognises
a deliverer, but, illogically, thirsts the more for his love. From
this figure with the firm, compassionate eyes and the exalted
self-possession, something breathes which associates him to her
sense with the figure, sought by her through the centuries, of
the derided Victim. She feels herself face to face once more with