“I trained me a falcon, More than a year. When I had tamed him, As I would have him, And had well tied his feathers With golden chains, He soared up very high, And flew into other lands. “I saw the falcon since, Flying happily; He carried on his foot Silken straps, And his plumage was All red of gold.... May God send them together, Who would fain be loved.” The key-note of the whole poem of the “Nibelunge,” such as it was written down at the end of the twelfth, or the beginning of the thirteenth century, is “Sorrow after Joy.” This is the fatal spell against which all the heroes are fighting, and fighting in vain. And as Hagen dashes the Chaplain into the waves, in order to belie the prophecy of the Mermaids, but the Chaplain rises, and Hagen rushes headlong into destruction, so Chriemhilt is bargaining and playing with the same inevitable fate, cautiously guarding her young heart against the happiness of love, that she may escape the sorrows of a broken heart. She, too, has been dreaming “of a wild young falcon that she trained for many a day, till two fierce eagles tore it.” And she rushes to her mother Ute, that she may read the dream for her; and her mother tells her what it means. And then the coy maiden answers:— “No more, no more, dear mother, say, From many a woman’s fortune this truth is clear as day, That falsely smiling Pleasure with Pain requites us ever. I from both will keep me, and thus will sorrow never.” But Siegfried comes, and Chriemhilt’s heart does no longer cast up the bright and the dark days of life. To Siegfried she belongs; for him she lives, and for him, when “two fierce eagles tore him,” she dies. A still wilder tragedy lies hidden in the songs of the “Edda,” the most ancient fragments of truly Teutonic poetry. Wolfram’s poetry is of the same sombre cast. He wrote his “Parcival” about the time when the songs of the “Nibelunge” were written down. The subject was taken by him from a French source. It belonged originally to the British cycle of Arthur and his knights. But Wolfram took the story merely as a skeleton, to which he himself gave a new body and soul. The glory and happiness which this world can give is to him but a shadow,—the crown for which his hero fights is that of the Holy Grail.