The object of Tacitus was to demonstrate the desperate
consequences of the loss of liberty on the minds and hearts of men.
* * * * *
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as
to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write
from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.
* * * * *
Really the metre of some of the modern poems I have read, bears about the
same relation to metre properly understood, that dumb bells do to music;
both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think.
* * * * *
Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon
the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which
shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those
which move his affections.
September 23. 1830.
LOGIC.
There are two kinds of logic: 1. Syllogistic. 2. Criterional. How any one
can by any spinning make out more than ten or a dozen pages about the
first, is inconceivable to me; all those absurd forms of syllogisms are one
half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric.
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