metimes these
sayings take the form of the cynical epigrams of a La Rochefoucauld; are
expanded into sententious aphorisms by a La Bruyere; or reveal more
earnest and athletic souls, who pierce below the social surface froth to
do battle with the demons of the intellect. To this class belong men
like the seventeenth-century Pascal and the nineteenth-century Amiel.

The career of Henri Frederic Amiel illustrates the dubiety of too hasty
judgment of a man's place or power in the world. A Genevese by birth, of
good parentage, early orphaned, well educated, much traveled, he was
deemed, on his return in the springtime of his manhood to his native
town as professor in the Academy of Geneva, to be a youth of great
promise, destined to become distinguished. But the years slipped by, and
his literary performance, consisting of desultory essays and several
slight volumes of verse, was not enough to justify the prophecy. His
life more and more became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian.
When he died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering
heroically borne, as pathetic entries in the last leaves of his Diary
remain to show, there was a feeling that here was "one more faithful
failure." But the quiet, brooding teacher in the Swiss city which has at
one time or another immured so many rare minds, had for years been
jotting down his reflections in a private journal. It constitutes the
story of his inner life, never told in his published writings. When a
volume of the 'Journal Intime' appeared the year after his taking off,
the world recognized in it not only an intellect of clarity and
keenness, and a heart sensitive to the widest spiritual problems, but
the revelation of a typical modern mood. The result was that Amiel,
being dead, yet spoke to his generation, and his fame was quick and
genuine. The apparent disadvantage point of Geneva proved, after all,
the fittest abiding-place for the poet-philosopher. A second volume of
extracts, two years later, found him in an assured place as a writer of
'Pensees.'

The 'Journal' of Amiel is symptomatic of his time,--perhaps one reason
why it met with so sympathetic a response. It mirrors the intellectual
doubtings, the spiritual yearnings and despairs of a strenuous and pure
soul in a rationalistic atmosphere. In the day of scientific test and of
skepticism, of the readjustment of conventions and the overthrow of
sacrosanct traditions, one whose life is that of thou