The Long-Desired and Promised Chemical-Philosophical Touchstone

—I may close with that which I actually wanted to begin with, the youth has a great inclination for poetry, in which he will awaken joy and admiration in you when he one day fixes himself upon something certain. Now, because of the weakness of his age, he is still too swaying and, as it were, staggering. He still thinks too little about what he wants to say, and expresses what he says with much pomp and ornament. Occasionally, a poem already escapes him that unites harmony, beauty, and dignity within itself, and which anyone who did not know the author would attribute to a practiced and educated man. His mind and style will, as I hope, gradually receive more firmness, and he will, I will not say flee, but yet so hide the imitation of individual men that he seems similar to none, and will enrich the Latin language and poetry with a new manner. Now he takes too much pleasure in imitations of others, as his age naturally brings with it; and carried away by the beauty of ancient poems, he climbs so high against the laws of art that even then, when he notices it himself or is made aware of it by others, he can only return with great difficulty. He admires Virgil most of all, fragments of whom he often brings into his verses. Since I see him growing up after me with inward pleasure, and wish with all my heart that he may become what I would like to be; so I warn him fatherly and represent to him that what he writes must indeed be similar to his model, but not identical; similar, in the way a son is to his father—

original Latin footnote: "castigata, et clara, seque ultro oculis ingerente, in qua nihil orthographicum, nihil omnino grammaticæ artis omissum diees." Translation: ...refined and clear, and offering itself spontaneously to the eyes, in which you would say nothing of orthography, nothing at all of the grammatical art has been omitted.