But every poet has a perfect right to deal with any story as he chooses, if he makes good poetry of it; and the poet of the _Nibelungenlied_ is more than justified in this respect. By curtailing the beginning, cutting off the _coda_ above mentioned altogether, and lessening the part and interest of Brynhild, he has lifted Kriemhild to a higher, a more thoroughly expounded, and a more poetical position, and has made her one of the greatest heroines of epic, if not the greatest in all literature. The Gudrun of the Norse story is found supplying the loss of one husband with the gain of another to an extent perfectly consonant with Icelandic ideas, but according to less insular standards distinctly damaging to her interest as a heroine; and in revenging her brothers on Atli, after revenging Sigurd on her brothers by means of Atli, she completely alienates all sympathy except on a ferocious and pedantic theory of blood-revenge. The Kriemhild of the German is quite free from this drawback; and her own death comes just when and as it should--not so much a punishment for the undue bloodthirstiness of her revenge as an artistic close to the situation. There may be too many episodic personages--Dietrich of Bern, for instance, has extremely little to do in this galley. But the strength, thoroughness, and in its own savage way charm of Kriemhild's character, and the incomparable series of battles between the Burgundian princes and Etzel's men in the later cantos--cantos which contain the very best poetical fighting in the history of the world--far more than redeem this. The _Nibelungenlied_ is a very great poem; and with _Beowulf_ (the oldest, but the least interesting on the whole), _Roland_ (the most artistically finished in form), and the _Poem of the Cid_ (the cheerfullest and perhaps the fullest of character), composes a quartette of epic with which the literary story of the great European literary nations most appropriately begins. In bulk, dramatic completeness, and a certain _furia_, the _Nibelungenlied_, though the youngest and probably the least original, is the greatest of the four. [Sidenote: _Metres._] The form, though not finished with the perfection of the French decasyllabic, is by no means of a very uncouth description. The poem is written in quatrains, rhymed couplet and couplet, not alternately, but evidently intended for quatrains, inasmuch as the sense frequently runs on at the second line, but regularly stops at the fourth. The normal line of which these quatrains are composed is a thirteen-syllabled one divided by a central pause, so that the first half is an iambic dimeter catalectic, and the second an iambic dimeter hypercatalectic. "Von einer isenstangen: des gie dem helde not."