Soon the fallen goddess, crushed and stupefied, is brought to Gunter. Sigfrid, after wresting from her the ring, symbol of constant tenderness, has dragged her by force to deliver her over to a stranger, while he now hastens into the arms of another woman. As the love of the daughter of the gods was sublime and absolute, so is her anger terrible in the face of this betrayal. Sigfrid is doomed to death. It is only by death that Brunhilda can reconquer the radiant hero to whom she has given all. He is destined to perish at the hunt, treacherously struck. The daughters of the Rhine emerge from the waves to warn him, at the same time demanding from him the ring, which envelopes him with its malediction; but Sigfrid refuses to restore it to them. Soon after, while he is giving his companions a recital of his life, seeing again little by little the thread of his memory, Hagen suddenly and treacherously strikes him with his lance. The hero sinks to the earth and dies, pronouncing the name, once more recalled, of Brunhilda. The warriors, in consternation, lay Sigfrid's body upon his buckler, and carry him slowly away in the light of the pale rising moon. In the last scene a groaning crowd bears Sigfrid's body under the massive portals of Gunter's dwelling, gloomily lighted by torches, and mingles its lament with the dull roar of the Rhine, whose dark waves flow in the background. Gutrune bursts into tears of despair, but Brunhilda, solemnly advancing, puts an end to this clamor. "I have heard," she says, "the tears of children lamenting their mother, but no lament worthy of a hero." Then she commands a vast funeral pile to be built, and when it has been lighted with a torch, and Sigfrid laid upon it, contemplating him with indescribable emotion, she withdraws from his finger the fatal ring, the cause of all misfortunes. "Suffering has made me prophetic," she says: "those who should efface the fault of the gods are predestined to misfortune and death. May our sacrifice put an end to the curse. May the ring be purified by fire. May the waters dissolve it forever! The end of the gods is at hand. But if I leave the world without a master, I bequeath to men the most sublime treasure in my knowledge. Know, then, that neither gold, nor divine splendor, nor omnipotence, gives happiness. Happiness, in joy or in suffering, comes from love alone." She has her horse brought to her by a Walkyria, and, leaping into the saddle, with one bound she rushes into the furnace. Then the Rhine overflows tumultuously, dispersing the ashes of the funeral pile. The daughters of the Rhine joyously lift up the reconquered ring, while Hagen, who had rushed forward to seize it again, is carried away with the flood, and on the heights in a dim light the Walhalla is seen crumbling about the gods, who fade away, and become effaced. PARSIFAL: A LYRICAL FEAST. FIRST ACT.