Herder

Use in the book

Herder’s function is unusually precise. Guérin first develops his own vision of a common principle moving blossom, singing bird, and the human observer at different levels of perfection. He then recalls reading in Herder that flowers perish after fertilization, birds lose song, gaiety, or bright plumage after nesting, and people decline after the age of passions. The recalled proposition brings a difficulty into the celebration: love’s manifestations are bound to depletion. Guérin ends with something to meditate upon, not a completed theory that would resolve it. The reference accordingly helps explain why spring’s fertility can carry intimations of loss without becoming simply a symbol of personal unhappiness. Later pictures of flowers dying after fulfilling their mission of love extend a closely related pattern, though they do not name Herder again. In the earlier Goethe passage, Herder is one member of a flourishing German literary world. Only the March 31 entry gives this particular reading a defined argumentative role. The book from which Guérin recalls the observation remains unspecified.

Places to read

1. 6 February 1833 · ¶1Herder first appears among the names evoking the vigorous growth of German poetry.
2. 31 March 1833 · ¶1The explicitly attributed observation joins reproduction to decline and invites further meditation.
3. 22 May 1833 · ¶1Flowers dying after their mission of love give a later, unattributed development of the same tension.

Translation in this edition

The words Je lisais dans Herder identify an author, not a book title. The successive examples are Guérin’s report of his reading and should not be silently presented as a verified direct quotation from Herder.