August 11. 1832.
HESIOD.—VIRGIL.—GENIUS METAPHYSICAL.—DON QUIXOTE.
I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say.
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There is nothing real in the Georgies, except, to be sure, the verse.[1] Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the first ordering of municipalities.
[Footnote 1: I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge paulo iniquior Virgilio, and told him so; to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore per Maronem. This was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C.'s apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my surprise.—ED.]
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All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal, however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances.
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Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him.