Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/611

 A striking conversation on the relations of men to women (Jan. 24, 1817) occurred between Platen and Friedrich Fugger. Fugger here declared himself an emphatic "Weiberfeind." In April, Platen made a pleasant acquaintance with one Captain Weishaupt, an intellectual, refined and well-mannered young officer of the artillery-corps. For a few weeks, the intimacy waxed considerably; Platen's mill-sails seem to have "gone round"—and rather briskly. But chiefly by his own inept, shy, awkward manner, his reserves and nervousness, as well as his real dread of feeling anything like a passion for another young man, the Weishaupt acquaintance fell through speedily. Platen once declares of Weishaupt that he "could trust him." That phrase, one becomes more and more sure of it, meant that he could trust his most secret nature to such a friend. But to Weishaupt he never did so. As May ended, Platen left Munich, on official leave, to spend all summer and much of the autumn at the quiet little village of Schliersee, in the near Bavarian Tirol. There he was much of the time alone, though with a few agreable acquaintances. He sent a casual farewell to Captain Weishaupt. We find him blaming himself sharply for having lost the chance to make a warm friend of Weishaupt by his badly managed relations with him, and by shy distrust.

Platen passed the time at Schliersee in incessant study, especially of the Latin classics; also in out-door life, and in writing verse, some of which is of import in his earlier published work. He continues nevertheless to feel scruples as to poetize at all, but "knows not what demon lures me to poetry-making," He has much, as usual, to observe concerning his own perplexing individuality; and—while the study of ourselves is by no means a safe guide really to knowing ourselves—doubtless Platen ripened and widened his character and cast some useful "cross-lights" on it during this Schliersee stay. Some of the retrospective passages in the Diary during this studious,