ou join them
imperfectly, if there are flaws in the hard steel, you shall learn
burnishing from me! For this very day, I swear it, I mean to have
the sword!" "What do you want this very day of the sword?" Mime
inquires in alarm. Siegfried, his heart inexpressibly lightened
by the positive knowledge that Mime is neither father nor any kin
to him, bursts into merry singing: "To go away, out of the woods
into the world. Never shall I come back!... As the fish gaily swims
in the flood, as the finch freely flies afar, so shall I fly, so
shall I dart... that I may never, Mime, see you more!" Off he storms
into the forest, leaving Mime shouting after him, a prey to the
utmost anxiety. The dwarf's difficulty is now twofold: "To the
old care I have a new one added!" How to retain the wild fellow
and guide him to Fafner's nest, and how to mend those pieces of
stubborn steel. "No forge is there whose glow can soften the
thorough-bred fragments. No dwarf's hammer can compel the hard
pieces...." In unmitigated despair, void of counsel, he drops on
his seat behind the anvil and weeps.

Ushered by great calm chords, measured and dignified as the gait
of a god on his travels, a wayfarer appears at the entrance of the
cave. He wears an ample deep-blue mantle, and for staff carries
a spear. On his head is a broad hat, the brim of which dips so
as to conceal one of his eyes. It is Wotan. Since parting from
Bruennhilde he has had no heart for warfare, no heart to ride to
battle without the "laughing joy of his eyes." Alone, unresting,
he has wandered all over the wide earth in search of counsel and,
very likely, distraction. A spectator he is in these days and not
an actor. His spirit has reached a state of philosophic calm. He has
learned better certainly than to meddle any more with anything that
concerns the accursed Ring. He is brought into the neighbourhood of
the still interested actors in that old drama in part by curiosity;
in part, no doubt, by the wish to watch the actions of Siegfried, his
beloved children's child. But in some faintest degree, at least, it
would seem, he is brought here by the invincible need to influence
these fortunes just a little, though it be firmly fixed that he
is not to try directly or indirectly to divert the Ring into any
channel which shall bring it eventually to himself. All else being
equal, he had a little rather strengthen Mime's chances of getting
the Ring, through Siegfried, than inactively se