Not a little of its musical glory grows out of its dramatic difficulties. In its beginning it deals with gods, dwarfs, nixies of the Rhine, and cumbersome giants, all fabulous, nebulous, in some instances almost intangible figures, whose only force lies in their simulation of humanity, and whose mastering weakness consists in their unreality. Gradually these gods and goddesses fade away and leave the picture occupied with purely human figures alone. The last majestic burst of supernal majesty is the final scene of "Die Walküre." In "Siegfried" a worn and weary wanderer, cherishing a feeble hope, powerless to turn the flow of events, passes across the canvas and dwindles out of sight before the dawn of human love. The rest is pure humanity, except when in the end of "Götterdämmerung" the imperial godhood of Brünnhilde enthrones itself upon the wreck of worlds, and sings the death-warrant of the waning Wotan and his wavering brood. The futile and disappearing gods! These are the weird and enchanting unrealities of Wagner's "Nibelungen" scheme. How they potter and fumble with the machinery of the inevitable! How they falter and fail in the presence of inscrutable Truth, which overcomes them like a summer cloud! They parade before us in "Das Rheingold," clad in a clarion of trumpets and trombones, made glorious with the radiance of Wagner's blazing sunlight of sonorous chords; but they are none the less futile. Save one,--Loge, the tempter, Loge, the spirit of indomitable evil, who sows the seed of destruction in the beginning and writes the plot of "Götterdämmerung" with a twist of his finger toward the gleaming gold. Of all Wagner's philosophic compositions, his psychological conjurations out of the shadowy depths of his own fancy and the equally cloudy shallows of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach, Loge is the most intimately conceived and the most finely wrought. Disappearing, indeed, he is, but by no means futile. The Mephistopheles of the rock-ribbed north, the Lucifer of the hills, he unites all the subtlety of the metropolitan conception of the sophisticated Goethe with the breadth and spontaneity of the harp-strokes of the storm-bred bard. Wagner does not paint Loge so brilliantly in text as he does in music. This Satanic tempter of the wise ones is an operatic character raised to the seventh power. His words are unconvincing without his music, which charges them and him with a boundless significance. Never once in all his flickering career does he utter a single sentence of such elemental majesty as that of Boito's Mefistofele: "Son lo spirito che nega." That looming figure of the archlibrettist of Tuscany spreads the shadow of contemporaneous sophistication across the operatic firmament. Standing with his defiant gaze upon the throne of the many-voiced invisible, he is a lyric reincarnation of the epic Lucifer of Milton.