Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/325

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cyclus, says Jason:

"In my fair home a fair belief is held.
That doubled, by the Gods, each human soul
Created is, and once so shaped—divided!
So shall the half its missing fellow seek
O’er land, o'er sea—till, when the lost is found,
Those parted halves unite, and forthwith blend,
Are one, at last! Feel'st thou, then, this half-heart?
Beats it with pain, divided, in thy breast?
O, come!—”[1]

Another vibrant instance, in "Well Dem Der Lügt" expresses well the immediate personal attraction between two men, and the subjection of one to the other, often part of the chemistry of their first intimacy:

"Only to see him walking through our streets.
Within me cried a voice—"Him must thou serve!
Him!—yea, though 'twere but as stall-boy!"[1]

The same mystery of immediate, unreasoning sympathy between two human souls, before acquaintance knits their attachment, is admirably put by Grillparzer in these lines:

"Like flash to metal, magnet sped to iron,
A Something goes, a Current mystic, strange,
From man to man—from human breast to breast!
Yet 'tis not Beauty, Grace, not Virtue, Right,
That bind or shall unbind, the magic thread:
Unseen is Inclination's charmed bridge—
The more we point it out, the less 'tis shown."[1]

A. von Sternberg's
Miscellaneous
Uranian Novels.

Allusion to the military romances of Alexander von Sternberg has been made in an earlier chapter. But the homosexual soldier was only one type treated by Sternberg. He was a voluminous writer in his field, and what with his imagination and his use of historical personages he made a sort of portraitgallery of homosexualism. He was born at Reval, in

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Transl. X. M.

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