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sion, proportionally, than in the Journal. In the volume called Grains de Mil, published in 1854, and containing verse written between the ages of eighteen and thirty, there are poems addressed, now to his sister, now to old Genevese friends, and now to famous men of other countries whom he had seen and made friends with in passing, which, read side by side with the Journal Intime, bring a certain gleam and sparkle into an otherwise sombre picture. Amiel was never a master of poetical form; his verse, compared to his prose, is tame and fettered: it never reaches the glow and splendour of expression which mark the finest passages of the Journal. It has ability, thought- beauty even, of a certain kind, but no plastic power, none of the incommunicable magic which a George Eliot seeks for in vain, while it comes unasked, to deck with imperishable charm the commonplace metaphysic and the simpler emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns. Still, as Amiel's work, his poetry has an interest for those who are interested in him. Sincerity is written in every line of it. Most of the thoughts and experiences with which one grows familiar in the Journal are repeated in it; the same joys, the same as

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pirations, the same sorrows are visible throughout it, so that in reading it one is more and more impressed with the force and reality of the inner life which has left behind it so definite an image of itself. And every now and then the poems add a detail, a new impression, which seems by contrast to give fresh value to the fine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of the Journal. Take these verses, written at twenty-one, to his younger sister

'Treize ans ! et sur ton front aucun baiser de mère

Ne viendra, pauvre enfant, invoquer le bonheur;

Treize ans et dans ce jour nul regard de ton père

Ne fera d'allégresse épanouir ton cœur.

'Orpheline, c'est là le nom dont tu t'appelles, Oiseau né dans un nid que la foudre a brisé; De la couvée, hélas! seuls, trois petits, sans ailes

Furent lancés au vent, loin du reste écrasé.

'Et, semés par l'éclair sur les monts, dans les plaines,

Un même toit encor n'a pu les abriter,

Et du foyer natal, malgré leurs plaintes vaines

Dieu, peut-être longtemps, voudra les écarter

'Pourtant

alarmes,

console-toi ! pense, dans tes

Qu'un double bien te reste, espoir et souvenir;

Une main dans le ciel pour essuyer tes larmes;

Une main ici-bas, enfant, pour te bénir.'

The last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them is there much poetical promise. But the pathetic image of a forlorn and orphaned childhood, 6 un nid que la foudre a brisé,' which it calls up, and the tone of brotherly affection, linger in one's memory. And through much of the volume of 1863, in the verses to 'My Godson,' or in the charming poem to Loulou, the little girl who at five years old, daisy in hand, had sworn him eternal friendship over Gretchen's game of 'Er liebt mich - liebt mich nicht,' one hears the same tender note.

'Merci, prophétique fleurette,
Corolle à l'oracle vainqueur,
Car voilà trois ans, paquerette,
Que tu m'ouvris un petit cœur.

Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle,
L'enfant aux grands yeux de velours
Maintient son petit cœur fidèle,
Fidèle comme aux premiers jours.'

His last poetical volume, Jour à Jour, published in 1880, is far more uniformly melancholy and didactic in tone than the two earlier collections from which we have been quoting. But though the dominant note is one of pain and austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion, and the general tone more purely introspective, there are many traces in it of the younger Amiel, dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to his sisters and his friends. And, in general, the pathetic interest of the book for all whose sympathy answers to what George Sand calls les tragédies que la pensée aperçoit et que l'œil ne voit point,' is very great. Amiel published it a year before his death, and the struggle with failing power which the Journal reveals to us in its saddest and most intimate reality, is here expressed in more reserved and measured form. Faith, doubt, submission, tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration, moral passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is the life of the religious soul- -they are all here, and the Dernier Mot with which the sad little volume ends is poor Amiel's epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell to that more public aspect of his life in which he had suffered much and achieved comparatively so little.

'Nous avons à plaisir compliqué le bonheur, Et par un idéal frivole et suborneur

Attaché nos cœurs à la terre;

Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l'important, Mille choses pour nous ont du prix . . . et pourtant

Une seule était nécessaire.

'Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux;

Cependant, au milieu des succès, des bravos En nous quelque chose soupire;

Multipliant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis, Nous voudrions nous faire une foule d'amis . . . Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire.

'Victime des désirs, esclave des regrets, L'homme s'agite, et s'use, et vieillit sans progrès

Sur sa toile de Pénélope;

Comme en sage mourant, puissions-nous dire

en paix

"J'ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me trompais;

Tout est bien, mon Dieu m'enveloppe."

Upon the small remains of Amiel's prose outside the Journal there is no occasion to dwell. The two essays on Madame de Staël and Rousseau contain much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as an appendix to some future edition of the

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