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,
"Wunderschoen! wunderschoen!" 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
finding of Brunnhilda by Siegfried, must now be considered. We hear the
clinking of Mime's hammer, and the curtain rises on his home in a cave.
All is dark within save for the smouldering smithy fire; but facing it
is the hole in the rock which is the entrance, and through it we see the
green summer forest. Mime is a malignant dwarf, in whose care Sieglinda,
dying in childbirth, has left Siegfried. Years have passed, springs and
summers and winters have come and gone; but Nature goes on in her
imperturbable way, and Brunnhilda still lies wrapt in slumber on the
mountain heights, the subject of awe-struck whispers amongst passing
tribes. Mime tries in vain to piece the sherds of the sword together;
Siegfried always smashes the new-made weapon at a single blow. The
Wanderer, in his blue cloak, enters: it is Wotan, the heart-broken god,
going wearily about the world awaiting what may happen. Again we hear
the whole history of the _Ring_, but this time it is wrought into, and
becomes an essential part of, the drama. Mime wagers his head that he
will answer three questions put to him by the Wanderer, and having
triumphed twice, is posed by the third: "Who wi