you but grasp it!--was naught
but love for you!"

It could hardly be hoped that the young forester should at this
moment be able to grasp anything so subtle, as he helplessly confesses:
"Wonderful sounds what you winningly sing; but the sense of it is
dark to me. I see your eye beam bright; I feel your warm breath;
I hear the sweet singing of your voice; but that which in your
singing you would impart, stupefied, I understand it not! I cannot
grasp the sense of distant things, when all my senses are absorbed
in seeing and feeling only you. With anxious fear you bind me:
you alone have taught me to fear. Whom you have bound in mighty
bonds, no longer withhold from me my courage!" Bruennhilde at this,
with the touch of nature which makes the Valkyrie kin to the young
lady of drawing-rooms, turns her head away and talks of something
else. She talks of Grane, whom she sees grazing a little way off.
As her eyes fall upon the corslet, cut from her body with a sword,
the sight smites upon her saddeningly, as a symbol. A consciousness
of danger and defencelessness oppresses her, and when Siegfried,
made bold in his fear of her by the very need he feels of overcoming
that fear, impetuously seizes her in his arms, in terror she starts
away from him and wrings her hands with a woful sense of not being
any more that Bruennhilde "whom no god had ever approached, before
whom reverently the heroes had bowed, who holy had departed from
Walhalla." She feels her wisdom forsaking her, her light failing,
night and terror closing down upon her. She appeals to him at last
against himself: "Oh, Siegfried, see my distress!"

He stands so still for a time, silent, puzzled by her, unwilling
certainly to frighten her further, that her immediate fear subsides;
her countenance betrays, the stage-directions read, that "a winning
picture rises before her soul." The character of this may be divined
from the melody rippling softly forth, the motif of peaceful love.
A fresh green branch, it makes one think of, with a nest upon it,
swinging in a summer wind. More gently she addresses him, pleading
rather than repelling, winning him to give up his way for hers.
"Eternal am I,... but eternal for your weal! Oh, Siegfried, joyous
hero! Renounce me.... Approach me not with ardent approach....
Constrain me not with shattering constraint.... Have you not seen
your own image in the clear stream? Has it not gladdened you, glad
one? If you stir the water into t