be pardoned; and he foresaw clearly that, in going to Vienna, he was marching into a lion's den, whence, for him, certainly there was no return. But, with a hardihood that never deserts him, if for no other reason than that no one may dare to call him a coward, he goes along with the doomed band, the only conscious among so many unconscious, who were destined to turn the halls of Hunnish merriment into mourning, and to change the wine of the banqueters into blood. So far, however, his dark anticipations prevailed with his unsuspecting comrades, that they marched in great force and well armed; so that when, after encountering some bloody omens on the long road, they did at length encounter the false fair welcome of the injured queen, they were prepared to sell their lives dearly, and to die standing. No sooner arrived than they were well advertised by the redoubted Dietrich of Bern, (Verona,) then attached to Etzel's court, of the temper of their hostess, and of the deathful dangers that awaited them behind the fair show of regal hospitality. This information only steeled the high heart of Hagan the more to meet danger in the only way that suited his temper, by an open and disdainful defiance. He and his friend Volker, the "valiant gleeman," who plays a distinguished part in the catastrophe of the poem, doggedly seated themselves before the palace gate, and refused to do homage to the Queen of the Huns in her own kingdom; and, as if to sharpen the point of her revenge, displayed across his knees his good broadsword, that very invincible _Balmung_ which had once owned no hand but that of Siegfried. This display of defiance was a fitting prelude to the terrible combat that followed. Though the knight of Trony was the only object of Lady Kriemhild's hatred, connected as he was with the rest of the Burgundians, it was impossible that the sword should reach his heart without having first mowed down hundreds and thousands of the less important subordinates. Accordingly, the sanguinary catastrophe of the tragedy consists in this, that in order to expiate the single sin of Hagan--proceeding as that did originally out of the false dealing of Siegfried, and the wounded pride of Brunhild--the whole royal family of the Burgundians or Niebelungers are prostrated in heaps of promiscuous slaughter with their heathen foemen, the Huns. The slaughter of the suitors, in the twenty-second book of the Odyssey, is ferocious enough to our modern feelings; but the gigantic butchery with which the Niebelungen Lay concludes out-purples that as far as the red hue of Sylla's murders did the pale castigation of common politicians. Eight books are occupied in describing the details of this red ruin, which a woman's revenge worked; and the different scenes are painted out with a terrific grandeur, that resembles more the impression produced by some horrid opium dream than a human reality. Victim after victim falls before the Titanic vastness of the Burgundian