in warning.
Bruennhilde now appears, takes the ring, and proclaims herself his true
wife. She mounts her steed, and dashes into the funeral pyre of
Siegfried after returning the ring to the Rhine-daughters. This
supreme act of immolation breaks forever the power of the gods, as is
shown by the blazing Walhalla in the sky; but at the same time justice
has been satisfied, reparation has been made for the original wrong,
and the free will of man becomes established as a human principle.

Such are the outlines of this great story, which will be told more in
detail when we come to examine the component parts of the trilogy. Dr.
Ludwig Nohl, in his admirable sketch of the Nibelungen poem, as Wagner
adapted it, gives us a hint of some of its inner meanings in the
following extract: "Temporal power is not the highest destiny of a
civilizing people. That our ancestors were conscious of this is shown
in the fact that the treasure, or gold and its power, was transformed
into the Holy Grail. Worldly aims give place to spiritual desires.
With this interpretation of the Nibelungen myth, Wagner acknowledged
the grand and eternal truth that this life is tragic throughout, and
that the will which would mould a world to accord with one's desires
can finally lead to no greater satisfaction than to break itself in a
noble death.... It is this conquering of the world through the victory
of self which Wagner conveys as the highest interpretation of our
national myths. As Bruennhilde approaches the funeral pyre to sacrifice
her life, the only tie still uniting her with the earth, to Siegfried,
the beloved dead, she says:--

"'To the world I will give now my holiest wisdom;
Not goods, nor gold, nor godlike pomp,
Not house, nor lands, nor lordly state,
Not wicked plottings of crafty men,
Not base deceits of cunning law,--
But, blest in joy and sorrow, let only love remain.'"

We now proceed to the analysis of the four divisions of the work, in
which task, for obvious reasons, it will be hardly possible to do more
than sketch the progress of the action, with allusions to its most
striking musical features. There are no set numbers, as in the Italian
opera; and merely to designate the leading motives and trace their
relation to each other, to the action of the _dramatis personae_, and
to the progress of the four movements, not alone towards their own
climaxes but towards the ultimate denouement, would necessitate far
more