“Sometimes ’twould pant and sigh and heave,
     As if to stir it scarce had leave;
     But having got it, thereupon,
     ’Twould make a brave expansion.”

In the play of the beloved woman’s garment, he sees the whole process of the central act of sex, with its repressions and expansions, and at the sight is himself ready to “fall into a swoon.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[13] G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. ii, p. 113.  It will be noted that the hand does not appear among the parts of the body which are normally of supreme interest.  An interest in the hand is by no means uncommon (it may be noted, for instance, in the course of History XII in Appendix B to vol. iii of these Studies), but the hand does not possess the mystery which envelops the foot, and hand-fetichism is very much less frequent than foot-fetichism, while glove-fetichism is remarkably rare.  An interesting case of hand-fetichism, scarcely reaching morbid intensity, is recorded by Binet, Etudes de Psychologie Experimentale, pp. 13-19; and see Krafft-Ebing, Op. cit., pp. 214 et seq.

[14] Memoires, vol. i, Chapter VII.

[15] Among leading English novelists Hardy shows an unusual but by no means predominant interest in the feet and shoes of his heroines; see, e.g., the observations of the cobbler in Under the Greenwood Tree, Chapter III.  A chapter in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (Part I, Chapter II) contains an episode involving the charm of the foot and the kissing of the beloved’s shoe.

[16] Schinz, “Philosophie des Conventions Sociales,” Revue Philosophique, June, 1903, p. 626.  Mirabeau mentions in his Erotika Biblion that modern Greek women sometimes use their feet to provoke orgasm in their lovers.  I may add that simultaneous mutual masturbation by means of the feet is not unknown to-day, and I have been told by an English shoe-fetichist that he at one time was accustomed to practice this with a married lady (Brazilian)—­she with slippers on and he without—­who derived gratification equal to his own.

[17] Jacoby (loc. cit. pp. 796-7) gives a large number of references to Ovid’s works bearing on this point.  “In reading him,” he remarks, “one is inclined to say that the psychology of the Romans was closely allied to that of the Chinese.”

[18] R. Kleinpaul, Sprache ohne Worte, p. 308.  See also Moll, Kontraere Sexualempfindung, third edition, pp. 306-308.  Bloch brings together many interesting references bearing on the ancient sexual and religious symbolism of the shoe, Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia, Sexualis, Teil II, p. 324.

[19] Jacoby (loc. cit. p. 797) appears to regard shoe-fetichism as a true atavism:  “The sexual adoration of feminine foot-gear,” he concludes, “perhaps the most enigmatic and certainly the most singular of degenerative insanities, is thus merely a form of atavism, the return of the degenerate to the very ancient and primitive psychology which we no longer understand and are no longer capable of feeling.”