Verlassen wirst du Haus und Herd um meiner Augen dunklen Schein. Du wirst verachtet und entehrt und wie ein Bettler wirst du sein ... Und um uns her ist Hass und Hohn, und alle werden uns verdammen, und alle Pfaffen werden droh’n mit Strafen und mit Höllenflammen. Wir sind verflucht für alle Zeit! und wirst doch Haus und Herd verlassen um meiner Augen Müdigkeit. “Crucifixa” pictures the innocence of a young girl before her initiation and her plight afterward: Ich sah an einem hohen Marterpfahle an einem dunklen Kreuz dich festgebunden. Es glänzten meiner Küsse Sündenmale auf deinem weissen Leib wie Purpurwunden ... Ich gab dir von dem Gift das in mir ist; ich gab dir meiner Leidenschaften Stärke, und nun, da du so ganz entlodert bist, graut meiner Seele vor dem eignen Werke. Ich möchte knie’n vor einem der Altäre die ich zerschlug in frevelhaftem Wagen— Madonna mit dem Augen der Hetäre, ich selber habe dich ans Kreuz geschlagen! And a later untitled poem goes even farther, in wishing the beloved dead rather than as she has become: Ich wollte, es läge kühl und blass dein geschändeter Leib unterm Kirchhofsgras, erlöst von Schmerzen und Sünd’, und fleckenlos wärst du auf’s Neue— ein Lilie im Morgenwind. One cannot help wondering whether Vivien, who knew German well and doubtless read these poems at about the time she was writing her own impassioned elegies to Violet, may not have felt their influence. During the 1890s the picturesque vagabond, Peter Hille, was roaming the country with his scribbled manuscripts in the pockets of his shabby jacket. He was so indifferent to publication that nothing was printed until after his death in 1904, when his friends assembled his _Collected Works_. Of these, the first volume is made up of poems, among them a long rhapsodic biography of Sappho,[41] representing her as devoted wholly to Beauty. She worships nature, women, and particularly youth as embodiments of beauty, and wants to remain young and free herself, leaving only her poems as offspring. But Hille hears premonitory echoes of “the thunder of Jove”—passion—which will presently overcome her. Therefore, his picture is that of an emotional adolescent; it evades her variant loves and stops short of her marriage, her childbearing, and of her hypothetical passion for Phaon. Among the prose “Aphorisms” in his second volume Hille includes a severe indictment of current lesbianism,[42] which he considers as depraved as any other illicit passion. He says that only women so dedicated to spiritual beauty as to forego all physical expression are entitled to call themselves disciples of Sappho. Thus he is a precursor of Rilke, who similarly idealized her emotional experience as nearer the “divine intent” even than happy heterosexual love. In short, both men are basically ascetic.