for each other--Victorious light!
Effulgent star! Radiant love! Radiant life!--the last good words
ever exchanged between them!--they tear apart, without sorrow or
foreboding. She watches him out of sight. The stage-directions
say: "From her happy smile may be divined the appearance of the
cheerfully departing hero." The emphatic phrase is heard, as he
descends into the valley, in which at their first meeting (in the
opera "Siegfried") they vowed that each was to the other "eternally
and for ever, his inheritance and his possession, his only and
his all!" The curtain closes on the Prologue.

By the music we can follow Siegfried on his journey. We know when
he comes to the fire, when he comes to the Rhine. There floats
to us, with the effect of a folk-song, a legend, the lament of
the Rhine-nymphs for their lost gold. Sounds of warning are in
the air as Siegfried approaches the Hall of the Gibichungen, but
to such the hardy hero, no need to say, is fast sealed.

The curtain unclosing shows the interior of the Hall of the Gibichungen,
open at the further end on the Rhine. Gunther, his sister Gutrune,
and their half-brother Hagen, sit at a table set with drinking-horns
and flagons.

This Hagen is the Nibelung's son of Erda's prophecy: "When the
dark enemy of Love shall in wrath beget a son, the end of the gods
shall not be long delayed." An allusion of Hagen's there is to
his mother, as having succumbed to the craft of Alberich. On the
other hand, a reference of Gunther's to Frau Grimhild, his mother
and Hagen's, would seem to show that her history, whatever it may
have been, bore no outward blot.

He is early old, this "child of hate," as Wotan long ago called
him, sere and pallid, totally unglad and hating the glad. He is the
tool created by Alberich--even as Siegmund was Wotan's tool,--to win
back for him the Ring. From his Nibelung father he has more than human
powers and knowledge. In the conversation which we overhear between
the brethren, we witness Hagen laying lines for the recapture of the
Ring and Siegfried's destruction, for he, like Mime, understands
that there can be no safety for him who shall unrightfully get from
Siegfried the Ring, while the strong-handed fellow lives.

Gunther--whose motif betrays him, with its little effect of shallow
self-satisfaction, like a jaunty toss of the head,--Gunther asks
Hagen, is he not magnificent, sitting beside the Rhine; to the
glory of Gibich? "It is my habit," r