usiness of song-making: "That
one may see that you have selected a mate!"

In that blissful garden a magnificent tree had proffered to his
desire a sumptuous harvest of golden fruit.... Such is the matter
of the second stanza.

"You did not," Sachs critically considers, "close on the same tone.
Excruciating is that to the masters, but Hans Sachs learns from your
doing it that in Spring-time it must perforce be so! Proceed now
to the aftersong."--"What is that?" asks Walther. "Your success in
finding a well-suited couple will appear now from their off-spring!"

In the garden, by an exquisite miracle, he had found suddenly standing
at his side a woman, more sweetly and graciously beautiful than
any he had ever beheld. Like a bride she had entwined her arms
softly about him, and had guided him, with eyes and hand, toward
the fruit of his desire, the fair fruit of the tree of life....

Joyfully stirred as he is by the beauty of dream and song, Sachs
controls his emotion, to secure all he can from the young poet's
momentary docility. "There's what I call an aftersong!" he exclaims
cordially; "See, now, how rounded and fine is the whole first part.
With the melody you deal, to be sure, a bit freely. I do not say,
however, that it is a fault. But it makes the thing more difficult
to retain, and that incenses our old men. Let us have now a second
part, that we may gain a clear idea of the first. I do not even
know, so skilfully have you cast them into rhyme, what in your
song was invention and what was dream...."

With heavenly glow of sunset-light, day had departed, as he lay
there drinking joy from her eyes, desire the sole power in possession
of his heart. Night had closed down, baffling the eyesight, when,
through the branches, the rays of two bright stars had shed their
light upon his face. The sound of a spring upon the quiet height
had reached his ear, murmuring more musically than any spring heard
theretofore; stars had appeared in multitude, dancing among the
boughs overhead, until, instead of golden fruit, the laurel-tree
had swarmed with a host of stars....

"Friend!" cries Sachs, striving against the full betrayal of his
pleasure, lest it be an interrupting element, "your dream was an
effectual guide! The second part is successful as the first. If
now," he ventures, "you would compose a third, it might contain
the interpretation of your dream...." But Walther jumps up from his
chair, suddenly weary of the ga