hour of
forgetting all the world outside themselves; the love-music is
all of a fine free sustained rapture. One poignant and subtle and
profound thing she says to him: "Foreign and unrelated to me seemed
until now everything I saw, hostile everything which approached
me. As if I had never known them were always the things that came
to me.... But you I knew at once, clearly and distinctly; my eye
no sooner beheld you, than you belonged to me; and all that lay
concealed within my breast, the thing which I verily am, bright
as the day it rose to the surface; like a ringing sound it smote
my ear, when in the cold lonesome strange world for the first time
I beheld my Friend!"

Seated in the light of the full moon, they have freedom at last
each to pore over the other's winning beauty. She is struck, fondly
peering into his features, with the sense of having seen him before;
and trying to think when and where reaches the assurance that it was
on the surface of the pool which reflected her own image. Again,
when he speaks, she is struck by the assurance that she has heard his
voice before. She thinks, for a moment, that it was in childhood,...
but corrects the impression by a second: she has heard it recently,
when the echo in the woods gave back her own voice. His luminous
eyes she has seen before: thus shone the glance of the grey guest
at the wedding-feast, whom his daughter recognised by that token.
Earnestly she asks this other guest: "Is your name in very truth
Wehwalt?" "That is no longer my name since you love me!" he replies
exuberantly, "I command now the sublimest joys!... Do you call me
as you wish me to be called: I will take my name from you!" "And
was your father indeed Wolf?" "A Wolf he was to cowardly foxes.
But he whose eye shone with as proud an effulgence as, Glorious One,
does yours, Waelse was his name!" Beside herself with joy, Sieglinde
springs up: "If Waelse was your father--if you are a Waelsung, for
you it was he drove his sword into the tree-trunk. Let me give
you the name by which I love you: Siegmund shall you be called!"
Siegmund leaps to seize the sword-handle: "Siegmund is my name,
and Siegmund am I! (_Sieg_: victory.) Let this sword bear witness,
which fearlessly I seize! Waelse promised me that I should find it
in my greatest need. I grasp it now...." Very characteristically,
this greatest need, as he feels it, is not the need of a weapon with
which to defend his life against Hunding; it i