fact that this master, in the first works produced after he had abandoned the old style,—“The Flying Dutchman,” and “Tannhäuser,”—dealt with these eternal types, while in “Lohengrin” he confined himself within comparatively narrower limits, returning to his first position when he had fully formulated the theories whose promptings rose within him as only vague, artistic instincts in his early works. And having cleared his theories from all doubts in his own mind, he emphasized the humanity of his mythical characters by some of his finest touches. “The northern Scalds created tremendous myths. The spirit of their poems was colossal. Passions and sweetness stood side by side and were delineated with master strokes. Lofty sentiment and heroic deed were darkened by unspeakable crime and black tragedy. The German bards denuded these old poems of their glory and made their personages small. The heroes and heroines of the Sagas were enormous unrealities; those of the Nibelungen Lied were almost pretentious nonentities. Wagner seized upon every trait of character and every incident that was most human and made masterly use of it. It is the ease with which we recognize in the people of ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ primeval human types that makes us receptive of their influence and movable by their greatness.”[18] Having found his people, the next object of the poet-composer was to select a flexible and yielding form for their utterance. He must find a form of verse which could be organically united with music, which would suggest a rhythmical basis for the melody, yet not control its construction. The various forms of modern versification, founded on the rhetorical accent of words, offered him no advantages, but, on the contrary, placed difficulties in the path of his movement. Rhyme, for instance, has no value whatever for the composer, unless he constructs the phrases and sections of his melody with the same number of feet and the same metrical pauses as are found in the verse; and this method, of course, gives the mere formalism of the poetry the government of the process of composition. On the other hand, blank verse is bound to find the same treatment in music as prose does. Wagner, therefore, turned to the metrical basis of all Teutonic poetry, namely, the alliterative line, as it is found in the “Eddas.” The peculiarity of this line is the emphasizing of its rhythm by the employment of similar sounds at the beginning of the accented syllables. A fair specimen of it is the opening of Siegmund’s love song in “Die Walküre”:— “Winterstürme wichen Dem Wonnemond; In milden Lichte Leuchtet der Lenz; Auf linden Lüften, Leicht und lieblich, Wunder webend Er sich wiegt.” [Illustration: RICHARD WAGNER AT BAYREUTH.—By G. Papperitz. ]