On peut comparer ces vers, aux idées exprimées par Lucrèce, dans son invocation à Vénus.
Page 238.
Comte de Peyronnet en Prison.
Vigneul de Marville dans ses "Mêlanges de Littérature," tome i., p. 215, rapporte plusieurs exemples de prisonniers qui se sont consolés avec les Muses, de la perte de leur liberté. Coupé, dans ses "Soirées Littéraires" tome x., p. 103, a ajouté plusieurs autres exemples à cette liste, qu'il ne prolonge pas, dit-il, parce-qu'il finirait peut-être par faire aimer l'état de prisonnier.
Page 249.
The Dynamic of a Particle.
Cette brochure imprimée à Oxford en 1869, commence par une préface, raillerie très plaisante sur la géométrie. En voici un extrait:—
"It was a lovely autumn evening, and the glorious effects of chromatic aberration were beginning to show themselves in the atmosphere, as the earth revolved away from the great western luminary, when two lines might have been observed wending their weary way across a plane superficies. The elder of the two had, by long practice, acquired the art of lying evenly between his extreme points; but the younger, in her girlish impetuosity, was ever longing to diverge and become an hyperbola, or some such romantic and boundless curve. They had lived and loved; fate and the intervening superficies had hitherto kept them asunder; but this was no longer to be: a line had intersected them, making the two interior angles, on the same side of it, together less than two right angles. It was a moment never to be forgotten, and, as they journeyed on, a whisper thrilled along the superficies in isochronous waves of sound: Yes! we shall at length meet, if continually produced! (Jacobi's Course of Mathematics, chap. i.)
"We have commenced with the above quotation as a striking illustration of the advantage of introducing the human element into the hitherto barren region of mathematics.