er, and make him master of
the world. This power shows itself afterwards undefined in some
directions and circumscribed in others, one never fully grasps
its law; one plain point of it, however, was to subject to the
owner of the ring certain inferior peoples and reveal to him the
treasures hidden in the earth, which he could force his thralls
to mine and forge and so shape that they might be used to buy and
subject the superior peoples, thus making him actually, if successful
in corruption, master of the world.

But this ring could by no possibility be fashioned except by one
who should have utterly renounced love.

For these things no reason is given: they were, like the Word.

One feels an allegory. As the poem unfolds, one is often conscious
of it. It is well to hold the thread of it lightly and let it slip
as soon as it becomes puzzling, settling down contentedly in the
joy of simple story. The author himself, very much a poet, must
be supposed to have done something of the sort. He does not follow
to any trite conclusion the thought he has started, he has small
care for minor consistencies. Large-mindedly he drops what has
become inconvenient, and prefers simply beauty, interest, the story.
Thus his personages have a body, and awaken sympathies which would
hardly attach to purely allegorical figures; a charm of livingness
invests the world he has created.

The Gold's home was in the Rhine, at the summit of a high, pointed
rock, where it caught the beams of the sun and shed them down through
the waves, brightening the dim water-world, gladdening the water-folk.
That was its sole use, but for thus making golden daylight in the
deep it was worshipped, besung, called adoring names, by nixies
swimming around it in a sort of joyous rite.

The mysterious potentiality of the gold was known to the Rhine-god;
three of his daughters had been instructed by him, and detailed
to guard the treasure. Some faculty of divination warned him of
danger to it, and of the quarter from whence this danger threatened.
But nixies--even when burdened by cares of state--are just nixies;
those three seem to have lived to laugh before all else--to laugh
and chase one another and play in the cool green element, singing
all the while a fluent, cradling song whose sweetness might well
allure boatmen and bathers.

Below the Rhine lay Nibelheim, the kingdom of mists and night,
the home of the Nibelungs,--dark gnomes, dwarfs, living in the
b