Yet Loge burns there:
Walhalla bid him revisit!
Draweth near in gloom
The Dusk of the Gods.
Thus, casting my torch,
I kindle Walhall's towers."
Ah, Isolde! How every man that has a heart can echo that marvellous phrase with which Wagner makes Tristan breathe forth his first and last sigh of love insatiable! Queen of the tawny locks and stately tread, thou art first shown to us as a woman of the old barbaric grandeur, hurling the full tide of thy passions against the inexorable advancing prow of Fate. The gates of honor thrown down, thou art but a woman loved and loving; and, mourning over thy lost chastity, art ready to sink into fathomless night with Tristan. After all, thou comest to the pale estate of chill despair and so diest, hymning a last sad canticle of love.
Isolde is beautiful, winsome, desirable. Men love her, but she does not dominate. Brünnhilde grows from a laughing light-elf to be a stricken woman, and thence is raised by the might of love to the majestic height of abstract womanhood divine. Isolde is a diminuendo; Brünnhilde a crescendo. In her last estate she stands disclosed in overmastering splendor, and mortal man in the honesty of his secret heart knows that, in the presence of such womanhood as this, he is utterly unworthy. And so we come to the end. Brünnhilde has joined hands with Loge and the "Rheingold" prophecy of Erda is fulfilled. The spirit of evil has become the renovator of the earth and all things are purified by fire. And the music! What majestic development of the Erda theme is this we hear in the Dusk of the Gods motive? There, indeed, is a psychological development, equalled only by the extraordinary mystic effects of the combination in Act I. of the themes of forgetfulness and the tarnhelm, by the wonderful recitative of the transformed Siegfried posing as Gunther, and by that highest of all songs without words, the funeral march.
The retirement of the futile and disappearing gods forces the purely human element to the front. The tragedy steadily waxes in power as the feeble ones of Walhalla grow fainter and the humans take the threads in their hands, till finally the one great, majestic creation of the whole trilogy is seen to be Brünnhilde, the eternal womanhood personified, the light of the world and the glory of Walhalla.