In fact, I think that this envy, and this desire [to humble their superiors], cannot be found in the kind of small-minded people that she [Madame de Staël] describes because such people have never considered genius and enthusiasm as a superior virtue, but rather as folly, youthful ardor, lack of prudence, experience, good sense, etc., and they think much more highly of themselves.
And this is precisely my experience, past and present.
And they could conceive envy for them, but envy of them as people whose reputation is mistaken and against good judgment, envy not of their genius but of the esteem they receive from it, for not only do they not believe them to be superior, but they think them very much inferior.引自 Zibaldone
The horror and fear of fate and destiny is to be found more (even today, when superstition is almost banished from the world) in great and powerful souls than in mediocre ones, because their desires and purposes are fixed, and they pursue them with ardor, constancy, and unswerving resolve. ... In fact, given the infinite variety of possible outcomes, the precise thing you seek unflinchingly is much less likely to happen than any of the infinite other possibilities. So when one event occurs rather than another, it is not an effect of fixed destiny pursuing you but blind accident. However, as is natural, the ancients, as in an optical or mechanical illusion, tended to confuse (and strong and ardent spirits still confuse) their own steadfastness with that of events, and because they were not the type of people to accept them and make compromises, they imagined that the obstinacy was not in them but in the events already ordained by destiny.引自 Zibaldone
Once heroism has vanished from the world and given way to universal egoism, true friendship, capable of leading one friend to sacrifice himself for the other, among people who still have other interests and desires, is extremely hard. And for this reason, though it is always said that equality is one of the most reliable bases for friendship, I find that nowadays friendship is less likely between two young people than between one young person and a man of feeling who is already disenchanted with the world and despairing of his own happiness. The latter, no longer having strong desires, is much more capable than a young person of attaching himself to someone who still has them, and of taking a lively and useful interest in him, thus forming a real, firm friendship if the other is willing to reciprocate.引自 Zibaldone
In any example or type of poetry whatever, poets should be very careful to avoid any suggestion of being ugly themselves, because when reading a beautiful poem, we immediately imagine a beautiful poet. We would find such a contrast really distasteful. Even more so if he were talking about himself, about his own misfortunes, his own unhappy love affairs, etc., like Petrarch, etc.引自 Zibaldone
In effect, Lord Byron’s poetry, which is very warm but whose warmth, for the reason stated, is not communicable, is for the most part an extremely obscure treatise on psychology, and not a very useful one at that, because the characters and the passions he describes are so strange that they do not correspond in any way to the feelings of the reader but strike in an awkward fashion, almost like angles or shards, and the impression they create is much more external than internal.
How utterly wretched and barbarous, therefore, is the modern practice of inserting little signs and dashes, and double or triple exclamation marks throughout a text or poem, etc. The whole of Byron’s Corsair (I am talking about the translation; I do not know about the text or the rest of his works) is interspersed with dashes, not only between one sentence and another, but between one phrase and the next, very often even a phrase itself is split up, and the noun is separated from an adjective with these dashes (all it needs is for the words themselves to be divided n the same way), as if telling us all the time, like some charlatan showing off his wares: “Look closely, watch out, the next bit is really good, take a look at this remarkable epithet, pause to consider this expression, think about this image,” etc. etc. This insults the reader, who, the more he sees himself obliged to take notice, the less inclined he is to do so, and the more something presents itself as beautiful, the more he wants to find it ugly, until in the end he takes no account of these signals and reads on calmly as if they were not there. I will not mention the incredible, continuous, very obvious effort with which his poor Lordship sweats and struggles to make every tiny phrase, every tiny addition seem new and original. There is nothing that has not been said a million times before that he does not repeat in some other way, an affectation as clear as daylight that is exceedingly distasteful, besides being tiresome in its uniformity and in the constant intellectual effort required to understand that extraordinarily calculated, obscure, and unceasing originality. (25 August 1820.)引自 Zibaldone
Z224-226 不知道Dickinson会否把他逼疯。
但是：
Leopardi was later drastically to revise this judgment, having read more of Byron’s poetry. See his letter of 5 June 1826 to Francesco Puccinotti: “He [Byron] really is one of the few poets worthy of the age, and of sensitive warm souls like you.” (trans. Prue Shaw)引自 Zibaldone
The universality of a language derives principally from the regularity, geometry, and ease of its structure, from the exactitude, material clarity, precision, and certainty of its meanings, etc., things which everyone can appreciate, being founded on dry reason and pure common sense, but which have nothing to do with beauty, richness (in fact, richness creates confusion, difficulties, and prejudice), dignity, variety, harmony, grace, power, lucidity, qualities that contribute less to the universality of a language, for (1) they cannot be intimately felt or appreciated except by native speakers, (2) they seek out an abundance of idioms and figurative expressions, in other words irregularities, that, however necessary they may be for beauty and pleasure, cannot coexist with monotony and with the rigidity of mathematical precision, and therefore detract considerably from mere usefulness, facility, etc.引自 Zibaldone
The superior man, with knowledge and experience of the world, one could say, although it might seem a paradox, is these days more likely to praise than to disparage. I mean with regard to real things. Because as long as he lacks experience of the world, small merits, signs of virtue, little examples of beauty, goodness, or greatness, in whatever kind of thing, will seem contemptible when he compares others with himself, as people usually do, or compares things with his imagination. But, with experience, finding himself always surrounded by excessive pettiness, wickedness, foolishness, ugliness, etc., he gradually learns to appreciate those small virtues which he used to despise, to be content with a little, to give up hoping for the best or the good, and to abandon the practice of comparing people and things with himself and with his own imagination.引自 Zibaldone
It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom, and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune (whether on account of lofty, powerful passions or something else), such works always bring consolation, and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost.
And the recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul when it is conveyed by a work of genius. And the spectacle of nothingness is itself a thing in these works, and seems to enlarge the reader’s soul, to raise it up and to make it take satisfaction in itself and its despair. (A great thing, and sure mother of pleasure and enthusiasm, and magisterial effect of poetry when it succeeds in enhancing the reader’s concept of himself, and of his misfortunes, and of his own dejection and annihilation of spirit.)
In addition, the feeling of nothingness is the feeling of something dead and deathly. But when this feeling is vivid, as in the case I am describing, its vividness prevails in the reader’s mind over the nothingness of the thing that it makes him feel, and the soul receives life (if only fleetingly) from the very force with which it feels the perpetual death of things, and its own death.
For no small effect of knowing the great nothing, and no less painful, is the indifference and insensibility that it very commonly inspires, and must naturally inspire, toward nothingness itself. This indifference and insensibility is removed by the reading or contemplation of a work of genius: it makes us sensitive to the nothingness of things, and this is the main cause of the phenomenon I have discussed.引自 Zibaldone
