they, queer people--they ran away. What do you think? Why did
they run away? What do you think? Look into my eyes. Do you see in them
a certain glimmer and a flash? The rays of my crown blind your eyes, you
are petrified, you are lost. I shall soon dance my last dance---do not
fall. I shall coil into rings, I shall flash my scales dimly, and I
shall clasp my steel body in my gentle, cold embraces. Here I am!
Accept my only kiss, my nuptial kiss--in it is the deadly grief of all
oppressed lives. One in many! One in many!

Bend down to me. I love you.

Die!

LOVE, FAITH AND HOPE

He loved.

According to his passport, he was called Max Z. But as it was stated
in the same passport that he had no special peculiarities about his
features, I prefer to call him Mr. N+1. He represented a long line of
young men who possess wavy, dishevelled locks, straight, bold, and
open looks, well-formed and strong bodies, and very large and powerful
hearts.

All these youths have loved and perpetuated their love. Some of them
have succeeded in engraving it on the tablets of history, like Henry
IV; others, like Petrarch, have made literary preserves of it; some
have availed themselves for that purpose of the newspapers, wherein the
happenings of the day are recorded, and where they figured among those
who had strangled themselves, shot themselves, or who had been shot by
others; still others, the happiest and most modest of all, perpetuated
their love by entering it in the birth records--by creating posterity.

The love of N+1 was as strong as death, as a certain writer put it; as
strong as life, he thought.

Max was firmly convinced that he was the first to have discovered the
method of loving so intensely, so unrestrainedly, so passionately, and
he regarded with contempt all who had loved before him. Still more, he
was convinced that even after him no one would love as he did, and he
felt sorry that with his death the secret of true love would be lost
to mankind. But, being a modest young man, he attributed part of his
achievement to her--to his beloved. Not that she was perfection itself,
but she came very close to it, as close as an ideal can come to reality.

There were prettier women than she, there were wiser women, but was
there ever a better woman? Did there ever exist a woman on whose face
was so clearly and distinctly written that she alone was worthy of
love--of infinite, pure, and devoted love? Max knew that t