Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/401

 of ardent and absorbing friendship and a stronger emotion is not one to be taken for granted, any more than in belles-lettres not in English. In Emerson's neo-grecian attitude to friendship, in his essays and his poetry, there is no clear uranian suggestion. To read uranianism between even such Emersonian lines as those that say that only through the friend is the sky blue, the rose red, the fountains of hidden life fair, is not by warrant. The same reserve applies to numerous contemporaries, including many in minor letters. Here and there, however, in current American periodicals, occur tales or. poems of at least a two-coloured psychic suggestion. In the chapter on military uranianism, was mentioned a recent volume, "The Spirit of Old West-Point" a charming series of reminiscences of cadet-days, by General Morris Schaf. In certain sketches of the late H. C. Bunner something of the uranian strain occasionally echoes. An openly homosexual novelette, apparently unique in such an explicit category in America, came many years ago from a New York journalist—"A Marriage Below Zero", signed with the pen-name "Alan Dale". The story, not one of any artistic development, narrates (in the person of a neglected wife) her marriage with an uranian, apparently a passivist, who cannot shake off his sexual bondage to an older and coarser man, an officer. The story ends in the young husband's suicide in Paris, after an homosexual scandal has ostracised him.

In the charming "South-Sea Idyls" of Charles Warren Stoddard, a Californian writer, and university-professor, occur episodes and suggestions of uranian complexion; though in case of a book so light-heartedly fantastic it is difficult to say where the personal and absolutely reminiscent are to be understood. Kána-Aná, Niga, Zebra, Joe, are eloquent as personalities. For example, can be cited here a fragment of the narration of one of the authour's predilections—the beautiful lad Kána-Aná, to whom is devoted