Later. - One of my students has just brought me a sympathetic message from my class. My sister sends me a pot of azaleas, rich in flowers and buds; sends roses and violets: every one spoils me, which proves that I am ill.

19th March 1881.-Distaste-discouragement. My heart is growing cold. And yet what affectionate care, what tenderness, surrounds me! . . . But without health, what can one do with all the rest? What is the good of it all to me? What was the good of Job's trials? They ripened his patience; they exercised his submission.

Come, let me forget myself, let me shake off this melancholy, this weariness. Let me think, not of all that is lost, but of all that I might still lose. I will reckon up my privileges; I will try to be worthy of my blessings.

21st March 1881. This invalid life is too Epicurean. For five or six weeks now I have done nothing else but wait, nurse myself, and amuse myself, and how weary one gets of it! What I want is work. is work which gives flavour to life. existence without object and without effort

It

Mere

is a poor thing. Idleness leads to languor, and languor to disgust. Besides, here is the spring again, the season of vague desires, of dull discomforts, of dim aspirations, of sighs without a cause. We dream wide-awake. We search darkly for we know not what; invoking the while something which has no name, unless it be happiness or death.

28th March 1881. I cannot work; I find it difficult to exist. One may be glad to let one's friends spoil one for a few months; it is an experience which is good for us all; but afterwards? How much better to make room for the living, the active, the productive.

'Tircis, voici le temps de prendre sa retraite.'

Is it that I care so much to go on living? I think not. It is health that I long forfreedom from suffering. And this desire being vain, I can find no savour in anything else. Satiety. Lassitude. Renunciation. Abdication. In your patience possess ye your souls.'

10th April 1881 (Sunday). —Visit to

She read over to me letters of 1844 to 1845

-letters of mine. So much promise to end in so meagre a result! What creatures we are! I shall end like the Rhine, lost among the sands, and the hour is close by when my thread of water will have disappeared.

Afterwards I had a little walk in the sunset. There was an effect of scattered rays and stormy clouds; a green haze envelops all the trees

'Et tout renaît, et déjà l'aubépine

A vu l'abeille accourir à ses fleurs,'

- but to me it all seems strange already.

Later. What dupes we are of our own desires! . . . Destiny has two ways of crushing us by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them. But he who only wills what God wills escapes both catastrophes. things work together for his good.'

'All

14th April 1881. - Frightful night; the fourteenth running, in which I have been consumed by sleeplessness.

...

15th April 1881.-To-morrow is Good Friday, the festival of pain. I know what it is to spend days of anguish and nights of

agony. Let me bear my cross humbly. . . I have no more future. My duty is to satisfy the claims of the present, and to leave everything in order. Let me try to end well, seeing that to undertake and even to continue, are closed to me.

19th April 1881. A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my heart fail

me.

'Que vivre est difficile, ô mon cœur fatigué !'

END OF VOL. II.

APPENDIX.

THE following short but valuable criticism of Amiel's philosophical thought, in its more technical aspects, has been sent me, at my request, by a friend well qualified to speak in the matter.-M. A. W.

So far as can be judged from the published fragments of the Diary, Amiel was not an adherent of any philosophical system. Ideas, however, which, for brevity's sake, may be called Hegelian, but which may have been derived from the most various sources, were constantly at his command as means of criticism and as aids to imagination; and where these ideas touched him nearly, as in all matters affecting the religious life, he made them his own and founded his life upon them. One remark at least on æsthetics-an analysis of the pleasure produced by so-called imitative art a distinction between character and disposition, directed against Schopenhauer's view that character is invariable; a doctrine of moral freedom in the same key as that distinction, treating moral freedom as not innate, but acquired; and above all, an ardent con