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 (afterwards the famous head of the Old Catholic Movement) with whom he was considerably taken. Of this came "only a friendship." But in June (the entries are of June 14, 15, 18, 21, 22, 24, and July 2, 4, 6 especially) came the Awaited. Platen happened to see a young student in the Law-Department, named Schmidtlein—Eduard Schmidtlein: who, by the by, we must not confuse with Platen's old friend Friedrich Schnitzlein. Eduard Schmidtlein became almost forthwith the object of one of Platen's most vehement passions; the center of a perfect seethe of the physical, as well as of the mental, in the unlucky poet's heart; his fellow-actor in a strange and not undramatic series of sentimental incidents.

Eduard Schmidtlein is called, during all the earlier entries of the Diary, simply "Adrastus." Platen did not know his baptismal name for a long time. Schmidtlein was of a well-to-do Bavarian family, was a good routine student, and afterward became a professor of law of some distinction—rather early. For more than a year we find him the center of Platen's, whole inner existence. What is more, Platen fought with Schmidtlein the Waterloo of his battle to love "without being sensually stirred;" land presently learned, all too thoroughly, after meeting Schmidtlein, that physical surrender and bodily possesion [sic] are the very nerves of the mystic drawing to manly beauty that the Uranian feels.

There is neither necessity nor possibility in undertaking here to detail all the course of this Schmidtlein affair at WürzbürgWürzburg [sic]—its leaps and bounds of growth, its frequent supposed subsidings, and its final imperiousness. The entries are in sharp contrast to the mass of those that deal with Platen's busy intellectual life at Würzburg, in the business of which it wrought now and then a nervous havoc. There are not less than three-hundred pages of memoranda about it! The main aspects and episodes are