To which she retorts: "What need is there of my pleasing you? I got a husband long ago--a handsome man, well able to take care of me." Whereupon the disappointed lover draws his knife and stabs her through the heart. In his _History of German Song_ (chap, v.), Edward Schuré comments on this poem in the following amazing fashion: "How necessary yet how tragic is this answer with the knife to the heartless challenge of the former sweetheart! How fatal and terrible is this sudden change of a passionate soul from ardent love to the wildest hatred! We see him taking one step back, we see how he trembles, how the flush of rage suffuses his face, and how his love, offended, injured, and dragged in the dust, slakes its thirst with the blood of the faithless woman." EROTIC ASSASSINS It seems almost incredible that such a villanous sentiment should have been allowed to appear in a book without sending its author to prison. "Necessary" to _murder_ a sweetheart because she has changed her mind during a man's long absence! The wildest anarchist plot never included a more diabolical idea. Brainless, selfish, impulsive young idiots are only too apt to act on that principle if their proposals are not accepted; the papers contain cases nearly every week of poor girls murdered for refusing an unwelcome suitor; but the world is beginning to understand that it is illogical and monstrous to apply the sacred word of love to the feeling which animates these cowardly assassins, whose only motives are selfish lust and a dog-in-the-manger jealousy. _Love_ never "slakes its thirst" with the blood of a woman. Had that man really loved that woman, he would have been no more capable of murdering her than of murdering his father for disinheriting him. Schuré is by no means the only author who has thus confounded love with murderous, jealous lust. A most astounding instance occurs in Goethe's _Werther_--the story of a common servant who conceived a passion for a well-to-do widow. He lost his appetite, his sleep, forgot his errands; an evil spirit pursued him. One day, finding her alone in the garret, he made an improper proposal to her, and on her refusing he attempted violence, from which she was saved only through the timely arrival of her brother. In defending his conduct the servant, in a most ungallant, unmanly, and cowardly way, tried to fasten the guilt on the widow by saying that she had previously allowed him to take some liberties with her. He was of course promptly ejected from the house, and when subsequently another man was engaged to take his place, and began to pay his addresses to the widow, the discharged servant fell upon him and assassinated him. And this disgusting exhibition of murderous lust and jealousy leads Goethe to exclaim, rapturously: