Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/315

 Knights of Malta"; while a novel, "The Game of Destiny," was another such project.

With Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) we meet a sort of revenant from the Greek Academy, embodied in a German. Hölderlin through his melancholy life (prolonged while in dementia) was wholly homosexual, save in a short and superficial episode—his sentiment for the brilliant wife of Gontard. Hölderlin's chief tie, that with his faithful Eduard Sinclair, was of passionate uranianism, a quality obvious in his writings, both of verse and prose.

The following extract from Hölderlin's novel "Hyperion" illustrates the quality of hellenic similisexuality in that book. The scene and time of the tale are modern Greece, and the hero Hyperion is a young Greek who has been educated under German culture, only to reject it rapidly and scornfully. He has returned to his native land shortly before a Greco-Turkish struggle in 1770. He is hyperæsthetic, patriotic, quite pagan in his temperament. He wanders for awhile in unfrequented rural districts, meditating and yearning romantically—to which phase are devoted the first chapters of the story—at most a slender matter. When alone in Asia Minor, he happens upon another mysterious rover, named Alabanda, somewhat his senior, who is a neo-hellenic kind of Childe Harold. With Alabanda is cemented an uranian bond. In spite of the sentimentality of the style, the episode has some graphic quality:

"The summer was nearly over; I had now the gloomy days of rain, and the whistling of the wind and the swollen rush of the mountain torrents about me: and Nature which had been like a foaming spring, leaping in the forest-plants and trees, now was in a melancholy mood, shutting herself into herself—as did I.