heism is the child
of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great
world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe.
Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only
reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the
greatest thoughts come from the heart--so says the moralist."

It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speaking, as, in what follows,
of Swiss frost:

[27] "Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and
peach-trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the
cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their
bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and
the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!" The
weather is seldom talked of with so much real sensitiveness to it as in
this:

"The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere grey; it is a time
favourable to thought and meditation. I have a liking for such days as
these; they revive one's converse with oneself and make it possible to
live the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a
minor key. We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its
very centre. Our very sensations turn to reverie. It is a strange
state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not the
empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are so
because at such times the soul, instead of being polarized, dispersed,
localized, in a single impression or thought, feels her own totality
and is conscious of herself."

[28] "Every landscape," he writes, "is, as it were, a state of the
soul": and again, "At bottom there is but one subject of study; the
forms and metamorphoses of mind: all other subjects may be reduced to
that; all other studies bring us back to this study." And, in truth,
if he was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent
literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of the
moral order. His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of the
moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with the
sort of literary work which stirs men--stirs their intellect--through
feeling; and with that literature, especially, as looked at through the
means by which it became capable of thus commanding men. The powers,
the culture, of the literary producer: there, is the centre of Amiel's
curiosity.

And if we take Amiel at h