Then to the poetical beauty of manner which first helped the book to penetrate, _faire sa trouée_, as the French say, we must add its extraordinary psychological interest. Both as poet and as psychologist, Amiel makes another link in a special tradition; he adds another name to the list of those who have won a hearing from their fellows as interpreters of the inner life, as the revealers of man to himself. He is the successor of St. Augustine and Dante; he is the brother of Obermann and Maurice de Guérin. What others have done for the spiritual life of other generations he has done for the spiritual life of this, and the wealth of poetical, scientific, and psychological faculty which he has brought to the analysis of human feeling and human perceptions places him--so far as the present century is concerned--at the head of the small and delicately-gifted class to which he belongs. For beside his spiritual experience Obermann’s is superficial, and Maurice de Guérin’s a passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate feeling. Amiel indeed has neither the continuous romantic beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of Senancour. The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden solitude, its primeval silences and its hovering eagles, the Swiss landscape described in the “Fragment on the Ranz des Vaches,” the summer moonlight on the Lake of Neufchâtel--these various pictures are the work of one of the most finished artists in words that literature has produced. But how true George Sand’s criticism is! “_Chez Obermann la sensibilité est active, l’intelligence est paresseuse ou insuffisante._” He has a certain antique power of making the truisms of life splendid and impressive. No one can write more poetical exercises than he on the old text of _pulvis et umbra sumus_, but beyond this his philosophical power fails him. As soon as he leaves the region of romantic description how wearisome the pages are apt to grow! Instead of a poet, “_un ergoteur Voltairien_;” instead of the explorer of fresh secrets of the heart, a Parisian talking a cheap cynicism! Intellectually, the ground gives way; there is no solidity of knowledge, no range of thought. Above all, the scientific idea in our sense is almost absent; so that while Amiel represents the modern mind at its keenest and best, dealing at will with the vast additions to knowledge which the last fifty years have brought forth, Senancour is still in the eighteenth-century stage, talking like Rousseau of a return to primitive manners, and discussing Christianity in the tone of the “Encyclopédie.”