May 8.

There are foods whose juice is commendable and whose flavor is not good. So with certain books, useful for reflection and unpleasant to taste. They are not good to read, but good to digest. One must seek only the chyle in them.

There are also books that are delicious only to ruminate on. Their manna is hidden. As in religious books.

The first poets or the first authors made foolish men wise. The latest seek to make wise men foolish.

Every poetic writing in which the author does not aspire only to please tends to bring about changes, and consequently to disturb what is in order when the world and states are faring well.

To fill an old word with a new meaning (of which usage had, so to speak, emptied it, or which its own age had let escape from it) is not to innovate but to rejuvenate. It is to enrich languages by digging into them. One must treat languages like fields. To make them fertile when they are no longer new, one must turn them over to great depths.

Oratio soluta, free discourse (or released from fetters). “Humane letters,” — humaniores litteræ, letters that speak more to man.

That the air is full of images, like water, and like everything liquid.

May 9.

— it is an indomitable and always trembling pride.

A book need not contain love to enchant us, but it must contain much tenderness.

May 10.

It is serious urbanity, (see Quin). — What we call the academic style was to have this character.

This poem is a very well performed bassoon concerto (and all musical instruments belong to the muses.)

May 12.

Mme de Staël is right “the earth... goes beyond its bounds” (and, as it were, its banks) through volcanoes. Apply this image to judgment that goes beyond every rule; — finally, to what is immobile (by its nature and its inclinations) when it becomes mobile.

A hardened and solid water, and an earth that detaches itself from itself, are two monstrously prodigious things (portentosa).