the murderer’s daughter had been carried away into safety by a faithful suitor, whom she, however, detested.  I had an irresistible impulse to call this maiden ‘Adelaide.’  As even at that early age I was a great enthusiast for everything really German, I can only account for the obviously un-German name of my heroine by my infatuation for Beethoven’s Adelaide, whose tender refrain seemed to me the symbol of all loving appeals.  The course of my drama was now characterised by the strange delays which took place in the accomplishment of this last murder of vengeance, the chief obstacle to which lay in the sudden passionate love which arose between Leubald and Adelaide.  I succeeded in representing the birth and avowal of this love by means of extraordinary adventures.  Adelaide was once more stolen away by a robber-knight from the lover who had been sheltering her.  After Leubald had thereupon sacrificed the lover and all his relations, he hastened to the robber’s castle, driven thither less by a thirst for blood than by a longing for death.  For this reason he regrets his inability to storm the robber’s castle forthwith, because it is well defended, and, moreover, night is fast falling; he is therefore obliged to pitch his tent.  After raving for a while he sinks down for the first time exhausted, but being urged, like his prototype Hamlet, by the spirit of his father to complete his vow of vengeance, he himself suddenly falls into the power of the enemy during a night assault.  In the subterranean dungeons of the castle he meets Roderick’s daughter for the first time.  She is a prisoner like himself, and is craftily devising flight.  Under circumstances in which she produces on him the impression of a heavenly vision, she makes her appearance before him.  They fall in love, and fly together into the wilderness, where they realise that they are deadly enemies.  The incipient insanity which was already noticeable in Leubald breaks out more violently after this discovery, and everything that can be done to intensify it is contributed by the ghost of his father, which continually comes between the advances of the lovers.  But this ghost is not the only disturber of the conciliating love of Leubald and Adelaide.  The ghost of Roderick also appears, and according to the method followed by Shakespeare in Richard iii., he is joined by the ghosts of all the other members of Adelaide’s family whom Leubald has slain.  From the incessant importunities of these ghosts Leubald seeks to free himself by means of sorcery, and calls to his aid a rascal named Flamming.  One of Macbeth’s witches is summoned to lay the ghosts; as she is unable to do this efficiently, the furious Leubald sends her also to the devil; but with her dying breath she despatches the whole crowd of spirits who serve her to join the ghosts of those already pursuing him.  Leubald, tormented beyond endurance, and now at last raving mad, turns against his beloved, who is the apparent cause of all his misery.  He stabs her in his fury; then finding himself suddenly at peace, he sinks his head into her lap, and accepts her last caresses as her life-blood streams over his own dying body.