certainly carried to its ideal of negation by Amiel. But the
completer, the positive, soul, which will merely take [25] that mood
into its service (its proper service, as we hold, is in counteraction
to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is also certainly in
evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"--that other, and far stronger person,
in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of gifts, not for
the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all that is
puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and
adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable
circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and
in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was
deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost
certainly find a Church.

The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel
known in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be
represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural
description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real
distinction. In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery.
But the record of such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as
happens with Amiel, we feel that there has been, and with success, an
intellectual [26] effort to get at the secret, the precise motive,
of the pleasure; to define feeling, in this matter. Here is a good
description of an effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners
resident in London:

"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own--a grace, a dreamy charm. It
does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the
mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun,
as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us;