delicate than robust, already disposed to a more or less melancholy and
dreamy view of life, and showing a deep interest in those religious
problems and ideas in which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the
days of Calvin. The religious teaching which a Genevese lad undergoes
prior to his admission to full church membership, made a deep impression
on him, and certain mystical elements of character, which remained
strong in him to the end, showed themselves very early. At the college
or public school of Geneva, and at the academie, he would seem to have
done only moderately as far as prizes and honors were concerned. We are
told, however, that he read enormously, and that he was, generally
speaking, inclined rather to make friends with men older than himself
than with his contemporaries. He fell specially under the influence of
Adolphe Pictet, a brilliant philologist and man of letters belonging to
a well-known Genevese family, and in later life he was able, while
reviewing one of M. Pictet's books, to give grateful expression to his
sense of obligation.

Writing in 1856 he describes the effect produced in Geneva by M.
Pictet's Lectures on Aesthetics in 1840--the first ever delivered in a
town in which the Beautiful had been for centuries regarded as the rival
and enemy of the True. "He who is now writing," says Amiel, "was then
among M. Pictet's youngest hearers. Since then twenty experiences of the
same kind have followed each other in his intellectual experience, yet
none has effaced the deep impression made upon him by these lectures.
Coming as they did at a favorable moment, and answering many a positive
question and many a vague aspiration of youth, they exercised a decisive
influence over his thought; they were to him an important step in that
continuous initiation which we call life, they filled him with fresh
intuitions, they brought near to him the horizons of his dreams. And, as
always happens with a first-rate man, what struck him even more than the