ur ride.

SCHNETZEN (kisses FREDERICK'S hand).
Farewell, my master.
(Aside.)
Ah, vengeance cometh late, Susskind von Orb,
But yet it comes! My wife was burned through thee,
Thou and thy children are consumed by me!
[Exit.]

SCENE II.

A Room in the Wartburg Monastery.
PRINCESS MATHILDIS and

PRIOR PEPPERCORN.

PRIOR.
Be comforted, my daughter. Your lord's wisdom
Goes hand in hand with his known piety
Thus dealing with your son. To love a Jewess
Is flat contempt of Heaven--to ask in marriage,
Sheer spiritual suicide. Let be;
Justice must take its course.

PRINCESS.
Justice is murdered;
Oh slander not her corpse. For my son's fault,
A thousand innocents are doomed. Is that
God's justice?

PRIOR.
Yea, our liege is but his servant.
Did not He purge with fiery hail those twain
Blotches of festering sin, Gomorrah, Sodom?
The Jews are never innocent,--when Christ
Agonized on the Cross, they cried--"His blood
Be on our children's heads and ours!" I mark
A dangerous growing evil of these days,
Pity, misnamed--say, criminal indulgence
Of reprobates brow-branded by the Lord.
Shall we excel the Christ in charity?
Because his law is love, we tutor him
In mercy and reward his murderers?
Justice is blind and virtue is austere.
If the true passion brimmed our yearning hearts
The vision of the agony would loom
Fixed vividly between the day and us:--
Nailed on the gaunt black Cross the divine form,
Wax-white and dripping blood from ankles, wrists,
The sacred ichor that redeems the world,
And crowded in strange shadow of eclipse,
Reviling Jews, wagging their heads accursed,
Sputtering blasphemy--who then would shrink
From holy vengeance? who would offer less
Heroic wrath and filial zeal to God
Than to a murdered father?

PRINCESS.
But my son
Will die with her he loves.

PRIOR.
Better to perish
In time than in eternity. No question
Pends here of individual life; our sight
Must broaden to embrace the scope sublime
Of this trans-earthly theme. The Jew survives
Sword, plague, fire, cataclysm--and must, since Christ
Cursed him to live till do