Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/596

 of Hanau. Platen never grew indifferent to his image, nor to the painful emotion that this death excited. He was often greatly depressed by it. There are plentiful references to the deceased young soldier, and to moods that his memory inspired. Even in mature life, after all his later experiences of quite other sort, we shall find in the Journal that the Prince Occupied a special and sacred niche in Platen's heart; probably because the sentiment had been so initiative and tragic. When he heard of the death of Prince Oettingen-Wallerstein, he went so far in his grief as to write a letter to the mother of the Prince—a letter the tone of which seemed to him in after-years indiscreet, to say the least—begging the lady to send him some personal relic of her son. He never received a reply. But we can believe that he had his own sentiment in fair perspective when he wrote, by and by:—"I loved my dead, whom I had only seen three times."

Pace by pace, with the beginnings in this way of Platen's homosexual life (and but little later) were certain likings and attractions Jo young men that were more of the nature of friendships; some of these being his life-long ones, as mentioned. Yet.it is noteworthy in their connection that such relationships, no matter into what they developed, always began with a glow of homosexual love; With his being "taken" at first sight by merely the beauty of the young man in question; his sense of male beauty catching fire. And sometimes they balanced a good while, in a curious, a plainly homosexual and Uranian way, between friendship and love, love and friendship; till they calmed to friendship only. Or (as is so characteristic of the Uranian) he ceased to care much or at all for the originators of these emotions. Among these intimacies we have that with Messerschmied, with Count Friedrich Fugger, Gustav Jacobs, Nathaniel Schlichtegroll, Max von Gruber, Adalbert Liebeskind, Friedrich Schnitzlein,