indicates that its writer drew on his own early history liberally, for this or that theme of his obscene verses, offered to Lorenzo de' Medici and much esteemed by him.
We have already spoken of Michel-Angelo Buonarroti, and of Cellini. Fuller allusion to the uranianism of those remarkable men will occur when we shall consider the Uranian in other than literary aesthetics.
German Belles-let-
al tres—the Mine-
singers—the later
Teutonic poets:
Homosexuality in the German Minnesingers has keen discussed recently in considerable special literature; the types of minstrels exemplified in Wolfram von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide and Heinrich von Morungen, etc., etc. Their piety, as mediaeval Catholics informed by a pagan-sensual temperament, rather drew them toward homosexualism than away from it. The tendency to glorify and idealize the feminine did not expel the aesthetic masculine from the poet-heart. Friendship by them was extremely sentimentalized; was made a cult. Mediaeval-Teutonic Europe rather substituted pederastic homosexualism by love of a man for a man, not for a mere lad. The Germanic race insisted on the psychic spell, the virile element enforced. It was uranistic love elevated in instinct and voice. This progression has continued in modern Germany and Austria, in their belles-lettres; by the poets, the romancists, the dramatists. Typical Germans who were not only similisexual in their writings, but personally uranians have been Hölderlin, Platen, Iffland, Hebbel and von Kleist; the sombre Lenau—that Hungaro-Austrian Shelly; Mosenthal; Alfred Meissner (the latter's life being concluded under an homosexual penumbra) and Alexander von Sternberg. But much of what was uranistically significant in the histories of these men was scarcely understood till they had long passed out of the world. Only
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