to see
the sparkling moonlight.

III

The Second Act opens in a wild and rocky place amongst the mountains.
Siegmund and Sieglinda have fled; Hunding is in hot pursuit; and now
Wotan stands, the mighty war-god, brandishing his spear, and calling
his daughter Bruennhilda, the Valkyrie, to favour and aid Siegmund. She
joyfully assents and goes off, and Wotan exults. He persists in
deceiving himself: Bruennhilda, his own daughter, was created to
execute his purposes: the Runes make him accountable for her actions,
just as he is now for Siegmund's and in the later operas for
Siegfried's. As in the _Rhinegold_, Fricka instantly bids him remember
what and _how_ he is. As the goddess of covenants, laws, she wants
vengeance wreaked on Siegmund and Sieglinda: they have broken the most
sacred of all covenants in the eyes of a woman, the marriage covenant.
Vainly Wotan pleads that the Valkyrie works unaided: she presses him,
until at last he swears a sacred oath on his spear that Siegmund shall
die. Bruennhilda comes in, whooping her war-call, but her voice drops
at the sight of Fricka. Fricka, who thoroughly despises all the
Valkyrie maidens as being born out of true wedlock, tells her to take
her orders from Wotan, and goes off triumphant. Wotan, deeply
despondent, terrifies Bruennhilda with his grief; she casts down her
spear and shield and kneels before him, imploring him to tell the
cause.

Then follows a scene that is, and always will be, a stumbling-block:
Wotan seeks to explain his position in quasi-Schopenhauerian
terminology and at immense length. We know all about it: it has been
explained amply in the _Rhinegold_ and in the scene we have just
witnessed, and now he must needs go over the ground again--with dreary
and soporific effect. Bruennhilda, as love incarnate, pleads for the
man and woman whose only crime in her eyes is that they love (for laws
are things pure love cannot understand). Wotan cannot but be obdurate;
he pronounces sentence on Siegmund and goes off in a storming rage.
Sadly Bruennhilda, comprehending nothing of the compulsion Wotan is
subject to--for how should love know aught of greed for power?--picks
up her weapons ("How heavy they have grown!" she says) and prepares to
warn Siegmund he must die. (No warrior could look upon a Valkyrie save
in the hour of his death; therefore no living being had ever seen
one.) As sounds of the approaching steps of panting people are heard
she retires among