Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/612

 solitary, summer (exactly such a summer as stimulates or depresses many and many a Uranian) have much interest, especially those in October. More striking are the memoranda, now quite positive, of Platen's realizing that he was out-and-out homosexual in his nature; incapable of loving any woman; destined to love only the male (see October entry, page 837, of the same First Volume) and his awakening knowledge that this sort of passion must needs be much a physical one, however clear its intellectual fire. He remarks at this time that he "trembles most" at discovering how his "inclination is directed toward his own sex, not to the feminine one." Yet apologetically he asks: "Can I change what is not my doing?"—the just, the eternal uranian appeal to Creative Fate. He likewise wonders whether should he marry, on a basis of friendship with some bride, sexual love for her would gradually come—another most frequent query in the mind of the similisexual of our date, and often such a dangerous illusion. Here too is a striking passage in the physical-sexualistic key: "I am at an age when love is demanded, which will not be satisfied with friendship.. Without any sensual feeling there can be no love. Federigo has never, in any way, awakened in me a base sexual-sensual impulse. But what if that should come as to others! O, rather than that, let some chasm open, and swallow me up! I would be lost! I would waste away in misery; for I never could attain my goal, I would shudder to reach it! How easily a noble love can lead us to the edge of despair I know: but how fearfully a sensual fire must ruin the whole man, that I have not yet experienced, though I have a cruel portent of it. So much is there in the world that makes me wish that I had never been born! "The passages here italized are eloquent of Platen's obstinate, troublous fight to convince himself that he had loved and had not desired; could love and yet not desire; and that there were really great distinctions between the complexions of this or that ardent passion