intellectual position. And certainly there is much in the book, thus
effectively presented to the English 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