want, as it were, of something else to think about. Not at all. The man
who has left us these microscopic analyses of his own moods and
feelings, had penetrated more or less into the social and intellectual
life of half a dozen European countries, and was familiar not only with
the books, but, to a large extent also, with the men of his generation.
The meditative and introspective gift was in him, not the product, but
the mistress of circumstance. It took from the outer world what that
world had to give, and then made the stuff so gained subservient to its
own ends.

Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at Berlin were
by far the most important. "It was at Heidelberg and Berlin," says M.
Scherer, "that the world of science and speculation first opened on the
dazzled eyes of the young man. He was accustomed to speak of his four
years at Berlin as 'his intellectual phase,' and one felt that he
inclined to regard them as the happiest period of his life. The spell
which Berlin laid upon him lasted long." Probably his happiness in
Germany was partly owing to a sense of reaction against Geneva. There
are signs that he had felt himself somewhat isolated at school and
college, and that in the German world his special individuality, with
its dreaminess and its melancholy, found congenial surroundings far more
readily than had been the case in the drier and harsher atmosphere of
the Protestant Rome. However this may be, it is certain that German
thought took possession of him, that he became steeped not only in
German methods of speculation, but in German modes of expression, in
German forms of sentiment, which clung to him through life, and vitally
affected both his opinions and his style. M. Renan and M. Bourget shake
their heads over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a
certain "barbarous" air to many passages of the Journal. But both admit
that Amiel's individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force to