June 19.

One must (in this kind) count by periods, not by centuries, that is to say, adjust time to the duration of things and divide it by them. In this way one subordinates an arbitrary and feigned measure to a true, visible, solid measure, real in a word, and worth more.

For example, from Ronsard to Malherbe there is one period; from Malherbe to Corneille, another; from Boileau and Racine to Voltaire, a third; from Voltaire to Ducis, to Roucher, to Delille and to Fontanes, a fourth. In poetry, we live under the period and the influences of the abbé Delille and Fontanes: the first two poets we named (Ducis and Roucher), who had entered the career with the other two, having done no more than show themselves there and having taken no step in it.

In the Malherbians, more sound than sense; in the Cornelians, more sense than sound; in the Boileauians and Racinians, the simple sound of sense; in the Voltaireans, more brilliance and movement than sense and sound; in the Delillians and above all in the Fontanesians, much sound, much brilliance, much sense, but little movement; otherwise one distorts this eminently severe kind and its pathetic beauties.

Lafontaine had all these kinds.

In Virgil, there is always a beautiful sound and a beautiful sense.

— When I say that this beautiful kind must have little movement, I mean no movement from right to left, from left to right, and nothing of what one can call gesticulating movement. For in other respects the tone it takes bears within itself a great principle of movement from below upward and of forward movement, [everything] proceeding in it essentially through harmonic successions, [kinds] of beauty that Voltairean versification never has and [cannot] have.

Literary sophistry, or the art of applying cosmetics to thoughts with words. Words apply cosmetics when they give thoughts brilliance without [adding] beauty. There is a luster necessary to every good style that is [not] properly a cosmetic; it is only cleanliness.

There is sometimes in style a luster, a brilliance, that is similar [to] that of metals. Those who use it do not, [properly] speaking, apply cosmetics, but gild what they say. One would think that they [write] with a shinier ink and have thrown either diamond powder or the dust [of] butterfly wings upon their still-fresh [writing]. None of this reaches the soul or taste, but [stops] at the eyes of the mind, which is at first dazzled and [imperceptibly] wearied by it.

Esménard offers a perpetual example of this kind of artifice.

Thus, cosmetics, gilding and the seductions of speech, or the artifices [of the] affective kind.

[…]amedi, June 20.

Everything is good in the good; the present, the past and the future. One [enjoys] it through memory, through prospect, through reality, a threefold kind of possession. Finally, the mere and single idea of some good is a [good].

June […]5.

Art and skill, skill and art. I mean a [natural] skill; and art never gives it.

June […]7.

The moon and its moist influences. And indeed, if, as they [say], it exerts such an action upon [the] ocean’s rests and movements, it must exert some other action upon the generation, duration [and] course of everything moist; upon the saps, upon the clouds, [upon] the rains, etc. Its waxings and wanings must cause [some] differences in them.

To ramble on is almost to chatter idly: to repeat one’s old ideas, one’s old judgments, one’s old stories, one’s old phrases, one’s old words, etc. To harp on, almost to chew again.

“To wish seriously,” as the Thousand and One Nights say. Mr. de P. does not insist enough on this condition in his experiments on his supposed somnambulism.