ly to greet you, if you are no
more to ride at my side, or reach me the cup of mead; if I am to
lose you whom I so have loved, O laughing joy of my eyes--a bridal
bonfire shall blaze for you such as never yet blazed for a bride! A
flaming barrier shall girdle the rock; with burning terror-signals
it shall frighten away the coward. The fainthearted shall keep afar
from Bruennhilde's rock. That one alone shall win the bride, who
is freer than I--the god!" In a speechless ecstasy of gratitude,
Bruennhilde sinks on his breast, and he holds her long silently
clasped, while there floats heavenward as if the very voice of
their relieved, pacified, uplifted hearts. Supporting her in his
arms, gazing tenderly in her upturned face, he takes his last leave
of her. There is a passage in Wotan's farewell which seems to contain,
compressed into it, all the yearning ache of all farewells, with
all the sweetness of the love which makes parting bitter. "For the
last time.... Farewell.... The last kiss...." These words occur
upon it. The motif it seems of the tragedy of last times; one wonders
could custom ever so harden him to it that he should feel no clutch
at the heart in hearing it. "For the last time I appease myself with
the last kiss of farewell.... Upon a happier mortal the star of
your eye shall beam. Upon the unhappy Immortal it must, in parting,
close. For thus does the god turn away from you, thus does he kiss
away your divinity!" He presses a long kiss upon each of her eyes,
and the first languor of sleep falling at once upon her, she leans,
without strength, against him. He supports her to a mossy knoll
beneath a spreading pine-tree, and lays her gently upon it; after
a long brooding look at her face, closes her helmet; after a long
look at her sleeping form, covers it with the great Valkyrie shield;
places her spear beside her, and with a last long sad look at the
slumbering motionless figure, turns away,--having effectually desolated
himself of the three dearest of his children.

Resolutely striding from the sleeper, he summons Loge, and commands
him in his original form of elemental fire to surround the
mountain-summit. At the shock of his spear against the rock, a
flame flashes and rapidly spreads. With his spear Wotan traces
the course the fire is to follow, girdling the peak. Nimbly it
leaps from point to point, till the whole background is fringed
with flame. At Wotan's words, "Let no one who is afraid of my spear