Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/634



The Sonnets are in the same boundlessly "passional" tone,—and yet more so!

We can repeat it—this passion of Platen was decidedly a pederastic sentiment, and one may suspect that his Persian readings had some share in its awakening. His health, his studies, his friendships, everything gave place to it for the time. But at last, Platen realized two important things: first that this was a case where "the glory was all in the worshipper;" and, second, that there was no hope of any intimacy. Hie mastered the emotion, in part, and in part he grew cold toward "Cardenio." They drifted apart. Platen last saw his Ganymede, by a queer coincidence, when "Cardenio" was sitting one day in August, 1824, with Eduard Schmidtlein—in another locality. But Platen's ardent emotions for both were no more!

Of Platen's acquaintance with another Erlangen, student, Peter Ulrich Kernell, a young Swede, who died suddenly, and almost, in Platen's arms, in April 1824, of another intimacy with the seductive Baron von