AMIEL'S JOURNAL INTIME. Henri Frederic Amid, though for more than 30 years professor in the Academy of Geneva, is remembered almost solely for his 'Journal In time,' to which he confided thoughts and im pressions, chiefly psychological, that he could not find the will to publish during his life. He bequeathed it, a manuscript of 1,700 pages, to Genevese friends that they might publish from it whatever seemed °to possess interest as thought or value as experience.' A first vol ume appeared in 1883 with a notable introduc tion by Edmond Scherer. A second and last followed in 1884. Both have been exception ally well translated, with a thoughtful intro duction, by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. The 'Jour nal> made an immediate and deep, though not wide, impression as being, in the words of Rena; °the perfect mirror of a modern mind of the best type, matured by the best modern culture, and also a striking picture of the suf ferings which beset the sterility of genius? The morbid introspection that numbed action in Amid, as in Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' seems to have been intensified by the conditions attend ing the recognition of his talent that he gained on his return to his native Geneva after six years' philosophical study, chiefly in Germany.
A democratic revolution had displaced in the city the old governing artistocracy in which was comprised nearly all its culture. To this new government he owed his professorship, an appointment which involved an almost complete social isolation of which the psychic effect is constantly reflected in the 'Journal.' Beauty of expression, psychological insight, untiring in tellectual interest, and above all a power of re vealing most poignantly an experience of spiritual uncertainty, in Scherer's words, °a will which wished to will but was powerless to furnish itself the motives for willing? which other over-refined and meditative minds feel to be akin to their own, assure the 'Journal' a high place in the literature of confession. There is a