ck of impassioned sighing seizes the
young Siegfried. "Oh, lovely song! Oh, sweetest breath! How its
message glows within my breast, burning me! How it sets my enkindled
heart to throbbing! What is it rushing so wildly through my heart
and senses?... It drives me, exulting, out of the woods to the
mountain-rock. Speak to me again, charming singer: shall I break
through the fiery wall? Can I waken the bride?" "Never," replies the
bird, "shall the bride be won, Bruennhilde wakened, by a faint-heart!
Only by one who knows no fear!" Siegfried shouts with delight: "The
stupid boy who knows no fear--little bird, why, that am I! This
very day I gave myself fruitless pains to learn it from Fafner. I
now burn with the desire to learn it from Bruennhilde! How shall I
find the way to her rock?" The bird forsakes the treetop, flutters
over the youth's head and flies further. Siegfried interprets this
as an invitation. "Thus is the way shown me. Wherever you fly, I
follow your flight!" We see him going hither and thither in his
attempt to follow the erratic flight of a bird. His guide after
a moment bends in a definite direction and Siegfried disappears
after him among the trees.

III

A wild region at the foot of a rocky mountain, the mountain at the
summit of which Bruennhilde sleeps. In night and storm Wotan the
Wanderer comes to seek Erda, the Wise Woman, the Wala. He conjures
her up from the depths of the earth into his presence. We see her
appear, as before, rising in the gloom of a rocky hollow up to
half her height.

In all his wandering over the earth, in search of wisdom and counsel,
none has Wotan found so wise as she. The question he proposes is:
How may a rolling wheel be arrested in its course?

Erda is not willingly waked out of her sleep, nor is it her wont to
communicate directly with the upper world. In her slow and solemn
sleep-weighted tones, she tells him that the Norns spin into their
coil the visions of her illuminated sleep. Why does he not consult
them? Or why, she asks, when that counsel is rejected, why does
he not, still mote aptly, consult Bruennhilde, wise child of Wotan
and Erda?

In his reply, Wotan briefly sums Bruennhilde's offence: She defied the
Storm-compeller, where he was practising the utmost self-compulsion;
what the Leader of Battle yearned to do, but refrained from, his
own antagonist,--all too confident, the insolent maid dared to
bring about for herself.

At the indication of Br