"Woe to me! How can he come? All too far is my true one. For him I shudder now in cold, now burn in fire. Thus Schionatulander makes me glow, His love kindles me as Agremontin does the Salamander." Yet whether lofty or earthly, platonic or ardent, the centre of the lyrics of the Minnesingers is always the relation of the sexes. The manner of giving expression to the "eternal feelings" as Goethe calls them varies according to the desire, the hope, or the hopelessness of the lover. The lady is entreated for grace (Huld); she encourages the knight or keeps him at a distance; love ceases to be pure, feelings become fantastically exaggerated; the veneration of woman becomes morbid, sometimes even senseless; love is often allegorized; a magic charm envelops the singer; the world surrounding him is changed, his nature passes the natural bounds; melancholy, ever the legacy of German nature even in the midst of joy, prompts the desire that the epitaph on his tomb should record how faithful he was to his lady. He dreams, perchance, that a rose tree with two blooming branches embraces him and interprets the dream as a fulfilment of his secret desire. This fantastic unnaturalness of the super-realization of love had a demoralizing effect upon both men and women: it developed mock lovers and mock love. Thus the love cult gradually degenerated. This was especially due to the fact that married women were in most cases the object of minne. French customs and thought entered more and more into German life. When the consummation of love appeared hopeless because of obstacles of a moral or social nature, the lovers, perchance, indulged themselves in a perverse mutual satisfaction of a puerile nature, such as the exchange of their undergarments for a night. Wolfram von Eschenbach relates that Gahmuret used to wear the shirt of his beloved Herzeloide over his armor in battle.