mountain to wed the first man who finds her. The other maidens fly in
horror; she alone remains to make an appeal to Wotan, as Siegmund had
appealed to her. At first he is obdurate, but she begs him to spare her
that frightful disgrace, and to surround her with a wall of fire through
which only a great hero will dare to pass. He yields, taking her
godhood, her limited immortality, away from her, putting her to sleep,
calling up the fire, and swearing that only a hero who has no fear of
his spear shall pass through, and so the drama ends. Wotan has
definitely renounced love. The moment at which he can renounce life
rather than endure life without love has not yet come. The old Adam, the
biological bias, the will to live, is strong in us all.

When Liszt read the score of _The Valkyrie_, he wrote to Wagner that he
wanted to cry, like the chorus on the miraculous arrival of Lohengrin,
"Wunderschön! wunderschön!" No man can cry otherwise to-day when he
hears the last act. The summit of artistic achievement seemed to be
reached in the second act, but we are now carried still higher. After
the Ride, with its unequalled painting of tempest amongst the rocks and
pines, there comes Brunnhilda's glorious chant as she sends off
Sieglinda, then her long supplication to Wotan, and finally the sleep
and fire-music and Wotan's Farewell. The black storm gradually subsides,
the deep-blue night comes on, and against it we see the swirling,
crackling flames as the fire mounts, forming an impassable barrier that
cuts off Brunnhilda from the everyday, busy world. All Brunnhilda's
plaint is magnificent in its sweetness and pathos; and the sleep-music,
with its caressing, lulling figure, is a thing by which a man's memory
might well live for ever.

This, the tragedy of Siegmund and Sieglinda and the punishment of
Brunnhilda, is the first of the subsidiary dramas; the second, the