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.
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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.
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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.
All syllogistic logic is—1. _Se_clusion; 2. _In_clusion; 3. _Con_clusion; which answer to the understanding, the experience, and the reason. The first says, this ought to be; the second adds, this is; and the last pronounces, this must be so. The criterional logic, or logic of premisses, is, of course, much the most important; and it has never yet been treated.
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