CHAPTER XIII.
The Life and Diary of an Uranian Poet: August von Platen (1796-1835).
"Love devours me, and he is, coldness itself … O, why has Providence made me what I am? Why is it impossible for me to love women?"
"You have torn my soul from out of me, robbed me of my soul and left me only my body—a heavy, terrible burden" … O reader, whosoever thou mayest be, into whose hands these lines perhaps may come, lament for me, weep with me, that I should have suffered so unspeakably!"
August von Platen-Hallermund, by aristocratic rank a count, a member of one of the oldest of Ansbach family-lines, and certainly one of the most gifted of poets in the portrayal of what is distinctively psychologic in similisexual love, was born at Ansbach, October 24, 1796; and died suddenly at Siracusa, Sicily, in November 1835, in only the fortieth year of a prematurely-ended career. His outward life was in no case eventful, compared with many poetical existences. It was chiefly, a matter of a short military-service, a considerable University-life, and then of about a dozen years of residence or travel in Italy, during which time his literary repute in his native Germany was reaching a high measure of critical and popular recognition. As a life, however, it was in no sense monotonous or stationary. Its inner chapters are a deep psychologic drama. Born of affectionate and careful parents, in easy circumstances, the earliest outward data to be noted include Platen's severe training, for the military profession, as a mere lad in the Cadet-School in Munich, till the year 1810; when, still a youth, he was enrolled
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