"I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you, — and full as much heart!
Sexual Desire
THE VOICE OF SALOME: Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I
have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was
it the taste of blood? . . . Nay; but perchance it was the taste of
love. . . . They say love hath a bitter taste. . . . But what
matter? what matter? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I have
kissed thy mouth.
As an erotic stimulant, more particularly, it may be observed that, considering the many intimate and sympathetic relations existing between the nervous branches of the extremity of the spinal marrow, it is impossible to doubt that flagellation exercised upon the buttocks and the adjacent parts, has a powerful effect upon the organs of generation…The case of John Jacques Rousseau is well known.
Will the hot sun never die?
He shines too bright, too long.
How slow the hours creep by!
Will the thrush never finish her song?
She is singing too merrily.
Oh when will the moon come, pale,
And strange? I am weary, I wait
For the sad sad nightingale
Ever sobbing insatiate.
Will the day-light never fail?
Lying asleep between the strokes of night
I saw my love lean over my sad bed,
Pale as the duskiest lily’s leaf or head,
Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat to bite,
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,
But too perfect-coloured without white or red.
And her lips opened amorously, and said—
I wist not what, saving one word—Delight.
And all her face was honey to my mouth,
And all her body pasture to mine eyes;
The long lithe arms and hotter hands fire,
Sun burning down on back and loins, penetrating the skin, bathing their flanks in sweat,
Where they lie naked on the warm ground, and the ferns arch over them,
Out in the woods, and the sweet scent of fir-needles
Blends with the fragrant nearness of their bodies;
In-armed together, murmuring, talking,
Drunk with wine of Eros' lips,
Hourlong, while the great wind rushes in the branches,
And the blue above lies deep beyond the fern-fronds and fir-tips;
You, proud curve-lipped youth. with brown sensitive face,
Why, suddenly, as you sat there on the grass, did you
turn full upon me those twin black eye of yours
With gaze so absorbing so intense, I a strong man
trembled and was faint?
Why in a moment between me and you in the full
summer afternoon did Love sweep- leading after it in procession
across the lawn and the flowers and under the waving
trees huge dusky shadows of Death and the other world?
I know not
HARK, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe
We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood
Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,
Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,
That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown
Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between
Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.
We are there, when we hear a shout
That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover
Makes dither, makes hover
And the riot of a rout