elight that bribes all living things to travail with renewed life. Life
itself, with its accomplished marvels and its infinite potentialities,
is the only force that Godhead can worship. Wotan does not yield until
he is reached by the voice of the fruitful earth that before he or the
dwarfs or the giants or the Law or the Lie or any of these things were,
had the seed of them all in her bosom, and the seed perhaps of something
higher even than himself, that shall one day supersede him and cut the
tangles and alliances and compromises that already have cost him one
of his eyes. When Erda, the First Mother of life, rises from her
sleeping-place in the heart of the earth, and warns him to yield the
ring, he obeys her; the ring is added to the heap of gold; and all sense
of Freia is cut off from the giants.

But now what Law is left to these two poor stupid laborers whereby one
shall yield to the other any of the treasure for which they have each
paid the whole price in surrendering Freia? They look by mere habit
to the god to judge for them; but he, with his heart stirring towards
higher forces than himself, turns with disgust from these lower forces.
They settle it as two wolves might; and Fafnir batters his brother dead
with his staff. It is a horrible thing to see and hear, to anyone who
knows how much blood has been shed in the world in just that way by its
brutalized toilers, honest fellows enough until their betters betrayed
them. Fafnir goes off with his booty. It is quite useless to him. He has
neither the cunning nor the ambition to establish the Plutonic empire
with it. Merely to prevent others from getting it is the only purpose it
brings him. He piles it in a cave; transforms himself into a dragon by
the helmet; and devotes his life to guarding it, as much a slave to it
as a jailor is to his prisoner. He had much better have thrown it all
back into the Rhine and transformed himself into the shortest-lived
animal that enjoys at least a brief run in the sunshine. His case,
however, is far too common to be surprising. The world is overstocked
with persons who sacrifice all their affections, and madly trample and
batter down their fellows to obtain riches of which, when they get them,
they are unable to make the smallest use, and to which they become the
most miserable slaves.

The gods soon forget Fafnir in their rejoicing over Freia. Donner,
the Thunder god, springs to a rocky summit and calls the clouds as a
she