_Invention as a Characteristic of Poets._--I happened this evening (Saturday, August 3rd, '44) to be saying of W. W. to myself: 'No poet is so free from all cases like this, viz., where all the feelings and spontaneous thoughts which they have accumulated coming to an end, and yet the case seeming to require more to finish it, or bring it round, like a peal of church bells, they are forced to invent, and form descants on raptures never really felt. Suddenly this suggested that invention, therefore, so far from being a differential quality of poetry, was, in fact, the polar opposite, spontaneousness being the true quality. _Tragedy._--I believe it is a very useful thing to let young persons cultivate their kind feelings by repeated indulgences. Thus my children often asked when anything was to be paid or given to any person, that they might have the satisfaction of giving it. So I see clearly that young boys or girls allowed to carry abroad their infant brothers and sisters, when the little creature feels and manifests a real dependence upon them in every act and movement, which _matre praesente_ they would not have done, which again seen and felt calls out every latent goodness of the elder child's heart. So again (here I have clipped out the case). However, feeding rabbits, but above all the action upon women's hearts in the enormous expansion given by the relation to their own children, develops a feeling of tenderness that afterwards sets the model for the world, and would die away, or freeze, or degenerate, if it were generally balked. Now just such an action has tragedy, and if the sympathy with calamities caused to noble natures by ignobler, or by dark fates, were never opened or moved or called out, it would slumber inertly, it would rust, and become far less ready to respond upon any call being made. Such sensibilities are not consciously known to the possessor until developed. _Punctuation._--Suppose an ordinary case where the involution of clauses went three deep, and that each was equally marked off by commas, now I say that so far from aiding the logic it would require an immense effort to distribute the relations of logic. But the very purpose and use of points is to aid the logic. If indeed you could see the points at all in this relation strophe antistrophe 1 2 3 3 2 1 ----, ----, ----, apodosis ----, ----, ----, then indeed all would be clear, but the six commas will and must be viewed by every reader unversed in the logical mechanism of sentences as merely a succession of ictuses, so many minute-guns having no internal system of correspondence, but merely repeating and reiterating each other, exactly as in men, guns, horses, timbrels, baggage-waggons, standards.