Let us consider once more the circumstances of the moon walking which accompanied this. He begins with this after his removal from Rodenstein and from his heart's beloved. There had preceded the grief over his wasted honor and his forfeited peace, the pain at the loss of the miller's daughter and, which is rather conclusive, the torturing regard for her future, which completely paralyzed his will power. The latter point is somewhat remarkable. For at bottom it was never said that her marriage was unhappy. The people had shaken their heads before it, only, and prophesied nothing good. When Martin fourteen years after the death of his brother meets Marie-Liese at his grave, she has become a handsome woman and has been a widow for eight years but is well poised mentally and lives for her boy. In Poldl's concern the wish must indeed have been father of the thought. If he could not have his treasure, then she should not be happy at the side of another man. Yet apparently this does not refer alone to the miller's daughter. Psychoanalytic experience teaches that where the reaction manifests itself all too strongly this happens because it is not merely a reaction to a present, but above all to a long past experience, which stands behind the other and offers first the original actual tonal background. Only apparently is the effect too strong, if we measure it merely by the actual cause, in truth however the action corresponds to all the causes, that is the new added to the old. We can say further, if we apply this experience to the poet's narrative, Poldl had not merely lost the miller's daughter forever by entangling himself with the vicar's daughter, but far more another, the one for whom he had entered orders. The mother had said to Martin, "There is only one way, one single way by which my boy can be saved from ruin and I can obtain peace and forgiveness from my sin." This task, to atone for the mother by a holy life, had not prevented him from a passionate love for Marie-Liese or from an intrigue with the pastor's daughter, yet, since he had on the latter's account lost his purity, something else was also laid waste thereby, that which had given peace to him and a purpose to his muddled life, the love for his mother. As he tarried already half in the other world, his last words were, "Yes, yes, were we now together, only you must not hold me so tightly to your breast." This had the mother in her tenderness done to her little boy. We see here the regression to the infantile, to a primitive child libido.