(...All that is merely jargon of the Necker family.)

July 31.

Our French odes are songs that are not sung and cannot be sung.

August 1 (on a sleepless night).

I would like thoughts to succeed one another in a book as the stars do in the sky: with order, with harmony, but at ease and at intervals, without touching, without merging; yet not without following one another, without accord, without fitting together. Yes, I would like them to roll without catching or holding on to one another, so that each could subsist independently. No cohesion too strict; but no incoherences either: the slightest is monstrous.

Unstrung pearls.

That great ring of time, the circle of the year.

July 28.

F[ontane]s. He maintains that R[eligion] is necessary to poetry, and [I] that it is necessary to philosophy.

July 29.

Let us not confuse what is merely intelligible, that is, easy to understand, with what is clear.

July 25.

Three things must necessarily enter an epic poem: heaven, earth, and the underworld; the top, the bottom, and the middle of the world. That is, the world must be found in it and, moreover, be whole in it, be one in it, be great in it (like the action).

Creation. — Let us suppose the writer recounts it as the spirits could see it. At first they saw a chaos for a span corresponding to the time of a day and a night... God had no need of time to act; but he needed it to show his action. And besides, why should time not be an ingredient necessary to all his compositions. He made it. Why should he not use it?

To make space for oneself to spread one’s wings.

July 27.

It was the mind, not imagination, that gave being to the chimerical or allegorical beings in the epic poem. Not everything can take a mask, a body, a role, etc., and become a character. And observe that good mythology had personified nothing that could not be personified; that it had made only shades, mere apprehensions, of what can be conceived or imagined only faintly... [the continuation illegible, three or four lines.]