Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/528



YEAR and a half ago, I had the privilege of reading Amiel's book—"Fragments d'un journal intime." I was struck by the significance and depth of the subject, the beauty of the thought, and, above all, the sincerity of the book. In reading it I made note of those passages that especially struck me. My daughter undertook to translate these passages, and thus arose these extracts from Amiel's Private Journal; that is, extracts from extracts of Amiel's very voluminous, unprinted journal kept by him from day to day in the course of thirty years.

Henri Amiel was born in 1821, in Geneva, and was early left an orphan. Having completed a course of higher education in Geneva, Amiel went abroad and then spent some years in the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. After his return to his own country in 1849, though only twenty-eight years old, he received the appointment in the Geneva Academy, first as Professor of Æsthetics and then of Philosophy, and there he remained until his death.

Amiel's whole life was spent in Geneva, where he died in 1881, in no wise distinguished from the great number of those very ordinary professors who, mechanically compiling their lectures from the latest books in their specialty, likewise mechanically repeat them to their hearers, and from the still larger number of unrestrained versifiers who offer their unnecessary but still salable wares to journals having a circulation of tens of thousands. Amiel had not the slightest success either