Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel

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CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Apr 5, 2015 - Biography & Autobiography - 316 pages
Amiel's Journal. The Journal Intime Of Henri-Frédéric Amiel. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. "Learn to limit yourself, to content yourself with some definite thing, and some definite work; dare to be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not and to believe in your own individuality." "Life is short, and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind."It was in the last days of December, 1882, that the first volume of Henri Frédéric Amiel's "Journal Intime" was published at Geneva. The book, of which the general literary world knew nothing prior to its appearance, contained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of M. Edmond Scherer, the well-known French critic, who had been for many years one of Amiel's most valued friends, and it was prefaced also by a little Avertissement, in which the "Editors"--that is to say, the Genevese friends to whom the care and publication of the Journal had been in the first instance entrusted--described in a few reserved and sober words the genesis and objects of the publication. Some thousands of sheets of Journal, covering a period of more than thirty years, had come into the hands of Amiel's literary heirs. "They were written," said the Avertissement, "with several ends in view. Amiel recorded in them his various occupations, and the incidents of each day. He preserved in them his psychological observations, and the impressions produced on him by books. But his Journal was, above all, the confidant of his most private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby the thinker became conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings of fate and the future, the voice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the soul's cry for inward peace, might make themselves freely heard.

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