a vague glance, "what was the sound I heard?"--"The shepherd's
pipe you heard again, after so many days! On the hillside he keeps
your flocks."--"My flocks?..."--"Master, that is what I said! This
is your house, your court and castle. Your people, loyal to the
beloved lord, saved for you, as well as they could, the patrimony
which my hero once made over to them outright, when he forsook
all to travel to a distant land."--"To what land?"--"Cornwall,
to be sure!" And the anxious grey-bearded nurse, to rouse in the
patient some gleam of joy in being, of pride in past prowess, breaks
enthusiastically forth: "Oh, what good fortune Tristan, brave and
bonny, met with there! What splendour of glory, what honors he
won in the teeth of his enemies!"--"Am I in Cornwall?" Tristan
asks discouragingly. "No, no, I have told you! At Kareol."--"How
did I get here?" Kurwenal almost laughs, and in the pride of the
unhoped-for hour cracks a joke. "How you got here? Not on horseback!
A little ship brought you, but to the ship I carried you on these
shoulders of mine. They are broad, they bore you to the shore.
And now you are safe at home, on your own land, the right land,
the native land, where amid familiar pastures and homely joys,
under the rays of the old sun, from death and wounds you blessedly
shall recover!" The rough fellow presses his cheek to his master's
breast, like a woman. There is silence. Tristan stares vacantly
ahead, vaguely pondering the servant's last words, of which the
echo has lingered teasingly in his ear. "Do you believe so?" he
says at last. "I know a different thing--but the manner of it I
cannot tell you! This where I have awakened is not the place where
I have been,--but where I have been--I cannot tell you! I did not
see the sun, I saw no earthly scene, nor any people, but what I
saw--I cannot tell you! I found myself--where from everlasting I
was, whither to everlasting I go: in the boundless realm of the
night which girds the world. One knowledge alone belongs to us
there,--divine eternal perfection of oblivion! How"--he faintly
wails, with a beginning of restlessness--"how have I lost the sense
of it? Is it you again, unforgotten longing, driving me back to
the light of the day? All that still survives in me, a pitiless
torturing love, impels me forth to gaze upon the light which,
deceivingly bright and golden, shines, Isolde, upon you!" With
the memory of Isolde becoming clear-defined again, as he emerge