Liebig extremely good-looking. He was intellectual, cordial and refined enough to be at once drawn to Platen. More than this—there is no doubt that Liebig, in these young days of his life, was strongly uranian; certainly he was homosexual psychically, even if not wholly such physically in the Diary. The intimacy was swift. Says Platen "… He gave me the evidence of so decided and sudden a liking that I am really in a sort of astonishment about it. So much love has nobody shown for me; at least no one on such slight acquaintance." Then, quoting a line of Hafiz, he adds his conviction that in this strange life of ours just so much as two men come together, just so much as they try to disclose their innermost existences to one another, only the more riddlesome creatures do they become. A few days later m Nürnberg, he remarks that he and Liebig could indeed be glad that they had "found, understood, loved and will forever love each other. He never has seemed to me nobler, tenderer, and never handsomer than now—though he always is handsome. A slender figure, a cheerful gravity in his regular features, large brown eyes."—"What do we not say, what do we not hope?" Liebig's fineness of sexual morality charmed Platen, though "we have no shyness as to kisses." … do not hold ourselves at all back, and Liebig himself was the first to say that we must not show to the false and evil-seeking eye of the world that inner feeling which we do not reserve when we are alone." But under Platen's unfortunate star of interruption the' time that these two had together was brief. They had not met till Liebig was about to leave Erlangen for good. Liebig was much a dionian-uranian. He had become involved while at Erlangen, in a serious scrape with a married woman there, which affair he had not disclosed to Platen. Coming to learn of it now was no small surprise and disgust to Platen, though he soon got over it wholly. Liebig went to Paris to study. Platen had (more than once) a plan of joining him in Paris; partly
— 610 —
(48)
