became in after years the fixed characteristic of the writer. "At twenty
he was already proud, timid, and melancholy," writes an old friend; and
a little farther on, "Discouragement took possession of him _very
early_."

However, in spite of this inbred tendency, which was probably hereditary
and inevitable, the years which followed these articles, from 1842 to
Christmas, 1848, were years of happiness and steady intellectual
expansion. They were Amiel's _Wanderjahre_, spent in a free, wandering
student life, which left deep marks on his intellectual development.
During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters were at Berlin;
but every vacation saw him exploring some new country or fresh
intellectual center--Scandinavia in 1845, Holland in 1846, Vienna,
Munich, and Tuebingen in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in
1841, and he was to make acquaintance with London ten years later, in
1851. No circumstances could have been more favorable, one would have
thought, to the development of such a nature. With his extraordinary
power of "throwing himself into the object"--of effacing himself and his
own personality in the presence of the thing to be understood and
absorbed--he must have passed these years of travel and acquisition in a
state of continuous intellectual energy and excitement. It is in no
spirit of conceit that he says in 1857, comparing himself with Maine de
Biran, "This nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in
me. My horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, things,
countries, peoples, books; I have a greater mass of experiences." This
fact, indeed, of a wide and varied personal experience, must never be
forgotten in any critical estimate of Amiel as a man or writer. We may
so easily conceive him as a sedentary professor, with the ordinary
professorial knowledge, or rather ignorance, of men and the world,
falling into introspection under the pressure of circumstance, and for