Decadence turned to paganism to grasp not only animal intimacies but also engagements with the environment more generally. Building on the queer trans-species intimacies articulated by Swinburne, Pater, Solomon, and Field, Chapter 4 addresses Robert Louis Stevenson’s and Vernon Lee’s renderings of the environment as genius loci. As I argue, for Stevenson and Lee the genii locorum are not fixed locations in nature but ecological entanglements among animal and vegetal species, geographic formations, and climate. Stevenson and Lee extend Pater’s ecological correspondences by presenting the immersive experiences of the peripatetic as sensual and psychological engagements with nature that result in a more vital identification outside the self. And in situating their analyses within the growing cultural practice of the nature walk, their writings redefine the genius loci as a dynamic engagement suggestive of early environmentalism.

The discussion of the term ‘new paganism’ in Chapter 1 notes the homophobic intimations that some critics made when addressing Algernon Swinburne’s andWalter Pater’s decadent works. However, as Swinburne’s ‘The Leper’ (1866) and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) make apparent, the intimacies that construct ecological communities are often far more amorphous or unprecedented than homophobic innuendos suggest. Chapter 3 addresses decadent desires as modes of perspectival code-switching accomplished through trans-species intimacies. Focussing on the strategic paganism in works by painter Simeon Solomon and poets Michael Field, I offer two queer models of what Henry Salt theorized, in Animals’ Rights (1892), as imaginative sympathy.