Fully to understand a great and beautiful thought requires, perhaps, as much time as to conceive it.
A few individual literary judgments now, and we shall have shown from Joubert all that our room will admit:
Seek in Plato forms and ideas only. These are what he himself sought. There is in him more light to see by than objects to see, more form than substance. We should breathe him and not feed on him.
Homer wrote to be sung, Sophocles to be declaimed, Herodotus to be recited, and Xenophon to be read. From these different destinations of their works, there could not but spring a multitude of differences in their style.
Xenophon wrote with a swan’s quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a stylus of bronze.
In Plato the spirit of poetry gives life to the languors of dialectics.
Plato loses himself in the void; but one sees the play of his wings; one hears the noise of their motion.
Cicero is, in philosophy, a kind of moon. His teaching sheds a light, very soft, but borrowed, a light altogether Greek, which the Roman has softened and enfeebled.
Horace pleases the intellect, but he does not charm the taste. Virgil satisfies the taste no less than the reflective faculty. It is as delightful to remember his verses as to read them.
There is not in Horace a single turn, one might almost say a single word, that Virgil would have used, so different are their styles.