Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/636

 side. The sonnets in question are fiercely—agonizingly—expressive of a love wholly ill-placed. But this passion, fortunately, proved to be relatively short. It was the old tale of Platen's curse—idealizing; of his being in a mood to seek a love where no basis could be maintained for friendship. The Karl Theodore German entries begin just when Platen was in a most melancholy humor, despite his recent literary successes; in the year 1826. They end in August, and German's name then lapses, for good and all. The two young men exchanged visits only once. We conclude that German was a mere lad. Platen presently was "healed of his grievous wound." But all the same, there are the sonnets "To Karl Theodore German," as the evidence of what he suffered. He writes also once in the Diary that—"Only Mercy (d'Argenteau) and Brandenstein can I put into the same category with him, I have loved these three above all others, and it is remarkable that all three have been blonds, with a distinct likeness of features." The psychologist smiles at Platen's use of the word "remarkable," in such ignorance of the tendency of homosexual (as of the heterosexual) love to particular physical "types."

The settled University life of Platen, and his unrecognition as a gifted dramatist and poet passed together. His profession and his fame in it appeared matters of no further doubt to him. The references in the poems themselves now and then frankly hint at this. In one of them he speaks of those who declare that there hangs already "the shadow of a laurel-wreath across his young brow." In the summer of 1824, came his first Italian tour. With this event, just at the very point where we would most naturally expect his homosexualism to speak out, when down in Italy (as later, after this first visit) his strange reserve deepens. His Diary is mute as to almost all his uranian heart-life. We may be sure that southern loves developed at once; and that no moral stresses against