Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/577

 and a Kleomenes; to Socrates and Plato, and Saint Augustine; to Servetus and Beza; to Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Augustus, and Hadrian; to Sweden's Charles the Twelfth, to Frederick the Great, to indomitable Tilly, to the fiery Skobeleff, the austere Gordon, the ill-starred Macdonald; to great Oriental princes; to the brightest lyrists and dramatists of old Hellas and Italia; to Shakespeare, (to Marlowe also, as we can well believe) Platen, Grillparzer, Hölderlin, Byron, Whitman; to an Isaac Newton, a Justus Liebig—to the masterly Jérôme Duquesnoy, the classic-souled Winckelmann; to Mirabeau, Beethoven, to Bavaria's unhappy King Ludwig;—to an endless procesion [sic] of "exceptional men," from epoch to epoch! As to these and innumerable others, whose hidden, and inner lives have proved without shadow of doubt (however rigidly suppressed as 'popular information') or by inferences vivid enough to silence scornful denial, that they belonged to Us."

"That redeeming Rest of us! That Rest, over and over again, typified! Uranians so high-minded, often of such deserved honour from all that world which has either known nothing of their sexual lives, or else has perceived vaguely, and with a tacit, reluctant pardon! Could one really believe in God as making man to live at all,and to love at all, and yet at the same time believe that this love is not created, too, by God? is not of God's own divinest Nature, rightfully, eternally—in milions [sic] of hearts?… Could one believe that the eternal human essence is in its texture today so different from itself of immemorial time before now, whether Greek, Latin, Persian, or English? Could one somehow find in his spirit no dread through this, none, at the idea of facing God, as his Judge, at any instant?… could one feel at moments such strength of confidence that what was in him so was righteousness?—oh, could all this be?—and yet must a man shudder before himself as a monster, a solitary and pernicious being—diseased, leprous, gangrened—one that must stagger along on the road of life, ever justly bleeding and ever the more wearied, till Death would meet him, and say "Come—enough! Be free of all! Most and best thing of all, be free of—thyself!"

"Is our Race gold or excrement?—is it rubies or carrion? If that last be true, why then all those other men, the Normalists—aye, our severest judges—those others whether good or bad, whether vessels of honour or dishonour, who are not in their love-instincts as are we—the millions against our tens of thousands, even if some of us are to be respected—why they do right to cast us out of society! for, after all, we must be just a vitiated breed!.. We must perhaps be judged only by our commoner mass."