Ir is somewhat late to speak of Amiel, but I was late in reading him. Goethe says that in seasons of cholera one should read no books but such as are tonic, and certainly in the season of old age this precaution is as salutary as in seasons of cholera. From what I heard I could clearly make out that Amiel's Journal was not a tonic book: the extracts from it which here and there I fell in with did not much please me; and for a good while I left the book unread.

But what M. Edmond Scherer writes I do not easily resist reading, and I found that M. Scherer had prefixed to Amiel's Journal a long and important introduction. This I read; and was not less charmed by the mitis sapientia, the understanding kindness and tenderness, with which the character of Amiel himself, whom M. Scherer had known in youth, was handled, than interested by the criticism on the Journal. Then I read Mrs. Humphry Ward's interesting notice, and then-for all biography is attractive, and of Amiel's life and circumstances I had by this time become desirous of knowing more-the "Etude Biographique" of Mademoiselle Berthe Vadier.

Of Amiel's cultivation, refinement, and high feeling, of his singular graces of spirit and character, there could be no doubt. But the specimens of his work given by his critics left me hesitating. A poetess herself, Mademoiselle Berthe Vadier is much occupied with Amiel's poetry, and quotes No. 335.-VOL. LVI.

Se plonge

Mon cœur, et que veut-il ?"

But M. Scherer and other critics, who do not require us to admire Amiel's poetry, maintain that in his Journal he has left "a book which will not die," a book describing a malady of which "the secret is sublime and the expression wonderful;" a marvel of "speculative intuition," a "psychological experience of the utmost value." M. Scherer and Mrs. Humphry Ward give Amiel's Journal very decidedly the preference over letters of an old friend of mine, Obermann. The quotations made from Amiel's Journal by his critics failed, I say, to enable me quite to understand this high praise. But I remember the time when a new publication by George Sand or by SainteBeuve was an event bringing to me a shock of pleasure, and a French book capable of renewing that sensation is seldom produced now. If Amiel's Journal was of the high quality alleged, what a pleasure to make acquaintance with it, what a loss to miss it! In spite, therefore, of the unfitness of old age to bear atonic influences, I at last read Amiel's

Y

Journal, read it carefully through. Tonic it is not; but it is to be read with profit, and shows, moreover, powers of great force and value, though. not quite, I am inclined to think, in the exact line which his critics with one consent indicate.

In speaking of Amiel at present, after so much has been written about him, I may assume that the main outlines of his life are known to my readers that they know him to have been born in 1821 and to have died in 1881, to have passed the three or four best years of his youth at the University of Berlin, and the remainder of his life mostly at Geneva, as a professor, first of aesthetics, afterwards of philosophy. They know that his publications and lectures, during his lifetime, disappointed his friends, who expected much from his acquirements, talents, and vivacity; and that his fame rests upon two volumes of extracts from many thousand pages of a private journal, "Journal Intime," extending over more than thirty years, from 1848 to 1881, which he left behind him at his death. This Journal explains his sterility; and displays in explaining it, say his critics, such sincerity, with such gifts of expression and eloquence, of profound analysis and speculative intuition, as to make it most surely "one of those books which will not die."

The sincerity is unquestionable. As to the gifts of eloquence and expres sion, what are we to say? M. Scherer speaks of an ever new eloquence" pouring itself in the pages of the Journal: M. Paul Bourget, of "marvellous pages" where the feeling for nature finds an expression worthy of Shelley or Wordsworth: Mrs. Humphry Ward, of "magic of style," of glow and splendour of expression," of the "poet and artist" who fascinates us in Amiel's prose. I cannot quite agree. Obermann has been mentioned: it seems to me that we have only to place a passage from Sénancour beside a passage from Amiel, to perceive the difference between a feeling for

46

"Shall I ever enjoy again those marvellous reveries of past days,-as for instance, once, when I was still quite a youth in the early dawn sitting amongst the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; another time in the mountains above Lancy, under the midday sun, lying under a tree and visited by three butterflies; and again another night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched full length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky Way? Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams in which one seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite? Divine moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought flies from world to world, penetrates the great enigma, breathes with a respiration large, tranquil and profound like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and boundless like the blue heaven! Visits from the Muse Urania, who traces around the foreheads of those she loves the phosphorescent nimbus of contemplative power, and who pours into their hearts the tranquil intoxication, if not the authority of genius, moments of irresistible intuition in which a man feels himself great as the universe and calm like God! ... What hours, what memories!"

And now for Obermann's turn, Obermann by the Lake of Bienne.

"My path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. Feeling inclined to muse, and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship in being all night out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise. I descended a steep bank, and got upon the shore of the lake where its ripple came up and expired. The air was calm; everyone was at rest; I remained there for hours. Towards morning, the moon shed over the earth and waters the ineffable melancholy of her last gleams. Nature seems unspeakably grand, when, plunged in a long reverie, one hears the rippling of the waters upon a solitary strand, in the calm of a night still enkindled and luminous with the setting moon.

"Sensibility beyond utterance, charm and torment of our vain years; vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we