ian muse, who is nevertheless not Urania.
In Scandinavian literature of the day names of several writers of greater or lesser note suggest themselves—including some of the Strindberg school. The pederastic homosexuality of that charming fabulist and mystic. Hans Christian Andersen was recently the subject of a close and affirmative German study.
As one acquaints himself with the personalities of many a distinctly uranian man of letters, and realizes the unrest, the solitude, the disappointments, the agonies of soul which have entered into lives, if not always into printed pages, he realizes the truth of a sonnet by a French uranian already cited, Jacques Adelswärd-Fersen:
"Vous qui lisez nos vers au clair de votre lampe
Et feuilletez nos cœurs avec un doigt distrait,
O vous, les inconnus, qui, sachant nos secrets,
Ecoutez le sang battre aux veines de nos tempes.
Vous qui, l'esprit tranquille et les sens apaisés,
Demandez à nos cris l'émotion divine,
Et sous votre douleur voulez que l'on devine
Les agonies du Rêve et l'espoir écrasé,
O vous, qui froidement, désirez la torture
Et dépecez à vif nos cruelles amours,
Qui cherchez dans un livre l'éphémère toujours
En oubliant nos noms, nos vies et nos blessures,
Pensez à ces instants de sauvages douleurs
Où notre enthousiasme au désespoir se brise,
Et pour que votre esprit trouve notre âme exquise,
A ce qu'un de nos vers doit contenir de pleurs![1]
- ↑ In making the foregoing references to belles-lettres that in colouring are more or less immediate to the topic of this book, its authour is well aware of how incomplete and arbitrary they may seem. Many names and titles inevitably must be absent that are of much interest and importance. The reader in fact is asked to accept what is offered as only a small contribution to a suitably general survey. Especially from the field of essays, philosophic studies and so on, there has been no room here, at the date when these pages go to
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