wrought thee, a beam of the morning bright,
    A fatherless motherless glory, to work out my desire;
    Then high my hope ariseth, and my heart is all afire
    For the world I behold from afar, and the day that yet shall be;
    Then I wake and all things I remember and a youth of the Kings I see—­
    —­The child of the Wood-abider, the seed of a conquered King,
    The sword that the Gods have fashioned, the fate that men shall sing:—­
    Ah might the world run backward to the days of the Dwarfs of old,
    When I hewed out the pillars of crystal, and smoothed the walls of
      gold!”

    Nought answered the Son of Sigmund; nay he heard him nought at all,
    Save as though the wind were speaking in the bights of the
      mountain-hall: 
    But he leapt aback of Greyfell, and the glorious sun rose up,
    And the heavens glowed above him like the bowl of Baldur’s cup,
    And a golden man was he waxen; as the heart of the sun he seemed,
    While over the feet of the mountains like blood the new light streamed;
    Then Sigurd cried to Greyfell and swift for the pass he rode,
    And Regin followed after as a man bowed down by a load.

    Day-long they fared through the mountains, and that highway’s fashioner
    Forsooth was a fearful craftsman, and his hands the waters were,
    And the heaped-up ice was his mattock, and the fire-blast was his man,
    And never a whit he heeded though his walls were waste and wan,
    And the guest-halls of that wayside great heaps of the ashes spent
    But, each as a man alone, through the sun-bright day they went,
    And they rode till the moon rose upward, and the stars were small and
      fair,
    Then they slept on the long-slaked ashes beneath the heavens bare;
    And the cold dawn came and they wakened, and the King of the
      Dwarf-kind seemed
    As a thing of that wan land fashioned; but Sigurd glowed and gleamed
    Amid the shadowless twilight by Greyfell’s cloudy flank,
    As a little space they abided while the latest star-world shrank;
    On the backward road looked Regin and heard how Sigurd drew
    The girths of Greyfell’s saddle, and the voice of his sword he knew,
    And he feared to look on the Volsung, as thus he fell to speak: 

    “I have seen the Dwarf-folk mighty, I have seen the God-folk weak;
    And now, though our might be minished, yet have we gifts to give. 
    When men desire and conquer, most sweet is their life to live;
    When men are young and lovely there is many a thing to do. 
    And sweet is their fond desire and the dawn that springs anew.”

    “This gift,” said the Son of Sigmund, “the Norns shall give me yet,
    And no blossom slain by the sunshine while the leaves with dew are
      wet.”