— Comparable to those white waxes that burn only for the altar [and] illuminate only palaces. He had their dryness, but a flexible [dryness]; and he had their purity.

A submission offered, a submission promised, a submission [sworn], a submission that in any case was owed and inevitable, seemed an [act] of heroism. A prince seemed to them exiled or banished to his [palace], a bishop to his diocese, a poet far from court. They pity [the] pontifical hands because they could no longer touch the [scepter] and because they held the censer.

A king who did not appreciate this mind appears to them an unjust monarch [and] almost an oppressive monarch. Cooled enthusiasm [seems] to them treachery; restrained partiality, a cowardly and shameful [abandonment]; loss of favor, an excessive persecution: as [if] this pious soul had been capable of saying:

Then I shall no longer be able to be seen except by God. (Boileau.)

This very ordinary occurrence, of two merits failing to recognize each other, [is] regarded here as a monstrous event, through [false] respect and false piety toward a false misfortune.

Naturally the soul sings to itself everything that is beautiful, or everything that seems so. And it does not always sing it to itself in verse or measured words, but in expressions and images in which there is a certain sense, a certain feeling, a certain form and a certain color that have a certain harmony with one another and each within itself.

When the soul happens to proceed in this way, one feels the fibers tighten and all come into tune. They resound of themselves and despite the author, whose whole labor then consists in listening to himself, tightening again the string he hears slackening and loosening the one that gives sounds too high, as those with a delicate ear are obliged to do when they play some harp. Those who have produced some piece of this kind will understand me well and acknowledge that to write and compose in this way, one must play, and that to play in this fashion, one must first make oneself, or become with each work, an organized instrument.

And, in this kind, the diapason, outside which there is no longer song, but noise, or at most chirping. And for each air, performance in a determined key, which must be kept to the end without changing it for a single instant.

To do well, one must forget that one is old when one is old, and not feel too strongly that one is young when one is young.

Astonishing, admirable. What astonishes astonishes once; but what is truly admirable is admired more and more:

and which, ever more beautiful, the more they are looked upon...

As hands would feel it or as the eye sees them; that is the great question.