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enced indeed, but still promising, as all seriousness of work and purpose is promising. All that is individual in it is first of all the strong Christian feeling which much of it shows, and secondly, the tone of melancholy which already makes itself felt here and there, especially in one rather remarkable passage. As to the Christian feeling, we find M. Rio described as belonging to that noble school of men who are striving to rekindle the dead beliefs of France, to rescue Frenchmen from the camp of materialistic or pantheistic ideas, and rally them round that Christian banner which is the banner of true progress and true civilisation.' The Renaissance is treated as a disastrous but inevitable crisis, in which the idealism of the Middle Ages was dethroned by the naturalism of modern times, 'The Renaissance perhaps robbed us of more than it gave us,' - and so on. The tone of criticism is instructive enough to the student of Amiel's mind, but the product itself has no particular savour of its own. The occasional note of depression and discouragement, however, is a different thing; here, for those who know the Journal Intime, there is already something characteristic, something which foretells the future. For in

stance, after dwelling with evident zest on the nature of the metaphysical problems lying at the root of art in general, and Christian art in particular, the writer goes on to set the difficulty of M. Rio's task against its attractiveness, to insist on the intricacy of the investigations involved, and on the impossibility of making the two instruments on which their success depends

- the imaginative and the analytical faculty- work harmoniously and effectively together. And supposing the goal achieved, supposing a man by insight and patience has succeeded in forcing his way farther than any previous explorer into the recesses of the Beautiful or the True, there still remains the enormous, the insuperable difficulty of expression, of fit and adequate communication from mind to mind; there still remains the question whether, after all, 'he who discovers a new world in the depths of the invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself alone, and, like Achilles, "devour his heart in secret;" whether the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them, and whether the deepest thinkers — those

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whose hand has been boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries beyond it had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive.'

Curious words for a beginner of twentyone! There is a touch, no doubt, of youth and fatuity in the passage; one feels how much the vague sonorous phrases have pleased the writer's immature literary sense; but there is something else too there is a breath of that same speculative passion which burns in the Journal, and one hears, as it were, the first accents of a melancholy, the first expression of a mood of mind, which became in after years the fixed characteristic of the writer. 'At twenty he was already proud, timid, and melancholy,' writes an old friend; and a little farther on, Discouragement took possession of him very early.'

However, in spite of this inbred tendency, which was probably hereditary and inevitable, the years which followed these articles, from 1842 to Christmas 1848, were years of happiness and steady intellectual

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expansion. They were Amiel's Wanderjahre, spent in a free, wandering student life, which left deep marks on his intellectual development. During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters were at Berlin; but every vacation saw him exploring some new country or fresh intellectual Scandinavia in 1845, Holland in 1846, Vienna, Munich, and Tübingen in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in 1841, and he was to make acquaintance with London ten years later, in 1851. No circumstances could have been more favourable, one would have thought, to the development of such a nature. With his extraordinary power of 'throwing himself into the object'. of effacing himself and his own personality in the presence of the thing to be understood and absorbed - he must have passed these years of travel and acquisition in a state of continuous intellectual energy and excitement. It is in no spirit of conceit that he says in 1857, comparing himself with Maine de Biran, 'This nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me. My horizon is vaster; more of men, things, countries, peoples, books; I have a greater mass of experiences.' This fact, indeed,

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of a wide and varied personal experience, must never be forgotten in any critical estimate of Amiel as a man or writer. may so easily conceive him as a sedentary professor, with the ordinary professorial knowledge, or rather ignorance, of men and the world, falling into introspection under the pressure of circumstance, and for want, as it were, of something else to think about. Not at all. The man who has left us these microscopic analyses of his own moods and feelings, had penetrated more or less into the social and intellectual life of half a dozen European countries, and was familiar not only with the books, but, to a large extent also, with the men of his generation. The meditative and introspective gift was in him, not the product, but the mistress of circumstance. It took from the outer world what that world had to give, and then made the stuff so gained subservient to its own ends.

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Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at Berlin were by far the most important. It was at Heidelberg and Berlin,' says M. Scherer, that the world of science and speculation first opened on the dazzled eyes of the young man. He was accustomed to speak of his four years

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