Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/604

 the Munich officers was a certain Captain Wilhelm von Hornstein, a remarkably good-looking officer, of rather notable family, as well as being a Knight of Malta—which Order, as the reader may remember, is one vowed to celibacy, not to say to chastity of every sort. Hornstein was a man of entirely mediocre, commonplace, matter-of-fact psychos; not in the least intellectual or romantic. But unluckily Platen did not find this out till too late. Platen fell in love with him, vehemently. Between Platen's own shyness and the difference in their ranks, with some other circumstances, Platen did not meet this new idol for a considerable while. During all the interim, the Diary is a daily witness to longings, dreams, doubts, hopes, fancies, rhapsodic outbursts, and so on; exactly as in the case of "Federigo." Moreover, this Hornstein affair was growing just in the time that "Federigo" was so potent in Platen's soul. Hence we find that Platen shows a good deal of the distress and surprise, natural to any fine and inexperienced nature, that a man can be in love with two human beings at once. This appeared to Platen a sort of mysterious monstrosity! He is ashamed to discover his "inconstancy," or—capacity. He does not understand how hearts are the subjects of "type-preposessions", over and over again—simultaneously. A plurality of loves seems to him disgraceful. On February 26, 1816 he writes: "My mood was never gloomier and heavier than yesterday evening. I was filled with the thoughts of only Wilhelm. Alone and lamenting, I sat at my writing-desk in the night".. And he reviews sadly how nearly he had met the beautiful Hornstein at last: "I came home and I threw myself on my bed, in a glowing longing. The sun and the new day have lightened only a little my yearning, along with a dream of Federigo. Is it not strange that I could dream of the latter, when I was so full of Wilhelm?" Then as if in self-apology, he says: "I love the first-named still—always; but I have not the least hope of meeting him, and I see him nowhere now." Platen's