University College, Oxford, the translator of Lotze, of whose care and
pains in the matter I cherish a grateful remembrance.

But with all the help that has been so freely given me, not only by
these friends but by others, I confide the little book to the public
with many a misgiving! May it at least win a few more friends and
readers here and there for one who lived alone, and died sadly persuaded
that his life had been a barren mistake; whereas, all the while--such is
the irony of things--he had been in reality working out the mission
assigned him in the spiritual economy, and faithfully obeying the secret
mandate which had impressed itself upon his youthful consciousness:
"_Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave
behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so_."

MARY A. WARD.




INTRODUCTION


It was in the last days of December, 1882, that the first volume of
Henri Frederic Amiel's "Journal Intime" was published at Geneva. The
book, of which the general literary world knew nothing prior to its
appearance, contained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of
M. Edmond Scherer, the well-known French critic, who had been for many
years one of Amiel's most valued friends, and it was prefaced also by a
little _Avertissement_, in which the "Editors"--that is to say, the
Genevese friends to whom the care and publication of the Journal had