the eye! Do not think to deceive me!" or "Do you imagine that
you can deceive me, who night and day have been hard upon your
heels?" Fricka, the guardian of marriage, has come to demand justice
for Hunding, vengeance upon the "insolently criminal couple." "What,"
asks Wotan, an unguarded and tender indulgence in his tone, "what
have they done that is so evil, the couple brought into loving
union by the Spring?..." "Do you feign not to understand me?" is in
effect Fricka's return; "for the holy vow of marriage, the deeply
insulted, I raise my voice in complaint...." "I regard that vow as
unholy," says Wotan,--and the source is flagrant from which Siegmund
has drawn his unpopular rules of conduct,--"which binds together
those who do not love each other." But the case in question, Fricka
protests, is not one simply of broken marriage-vow, "When--when
was it ever known that brother and sister might stand toward each
other in the nuptial relation?" "This day you have known it!" the
worthy teacher of Siegmund meets her; and, all his paternal affection
finding its imprudent way into his accents: "That those two love each
other is clear to you. Wherefore, take honest advice: if blessed
comfort is to reward your blessing, do you bless, laughing with
love, the union of Siegmund and Sieglinde!" Upon this, as is hardly
unnatural, the furious storm breaks over the indiscreet god; a
storm of reproach, in part for personal wrongs, which the outraged
goddess details, in part for his failure as ruler of the earth to
maintain law and right, to observe the boundaries established by
himself. At the end of it, rather feebly, he tells her, in defence
of his position, the thing which he had not confided to her before,
plain enough indication that the goddess, to win whom he had given
an eye, is not of his bosom's counsel any more. "This know! There
is need of a hero who without aid from the gods should cast off
the law of the gods. Such a one alone can compass the act which,
however much the gods may need it done, no god can himself do."
"And what may the great thing be," the dull august shrew inquires,
"that a hero can do which the gods cannot, through whose grace alone
a hero acts?... What makes men brave? Through your inspiration
alone they are strong. With new falsehoods you are trying to elude
me, but this Waelsung you shall not be able to save. Through him
I strike at you, for it is through you alone he defies me!" "In
wild sorrows," W