glish reader,
to attract those who interest themselves in the study of the finer
types of human nature, of literary expression, of metaphysical and
practical philosophy; to attract, above all, those interested in such
philosophy, at points where it touches upon questions of religion, and
especially at the present day.

Henri-Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821. Orphaned of both his
parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little bare
and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in him
early. His student days coming to an end, the years which followed,
from 1842 to 1848--Wanderjahre, in which he visited Holland, Italy,
Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany--seem to have been the
happiest of his life. In 1849 he became a Professor at Geneva, and
there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of outward events.
He published some volumes of verse; to the last apparently still only
feeling after his true literary metier. Those last seven years were a
long struggle against the disease which ended his life, consumption, at
the age of fifty-three. The first entry in his Journal is in 1848.
From that date to his death, a period of over twenty-five years, this
Journal was the real object of all the energies of his richly-endowed
nature: and from its voluminous sheets his literary executors have
selected the deeply interesting volumes now presented in English.

With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy
life--melancholy with something not altogether explained by the
somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the
consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from
a very early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile
himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from
sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.

You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a
thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern
spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied
intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many
very various types of contemporary ability. The use of his book to
cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by
which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality of
their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects. He will write a
page or two, giving evidence of tha