acutely pathetic. The pain which consumed him arose from the concentration of self on self. Self was monopolised by self, self-consciousness was produced, though without a touch of selfish egoism. Out of this self-conscious introspection, grew that sterility of soul and mind, that dwindling of capacity, and individuality, which Amiel felt was taking place within him. A constant, aimless, inevitable habit of self-introspection was killing his mental life, before the end came physically. Another philosophical victim to the same habit was John Stuart Mill, at one time of his life. His father analysed almost everything, except himself, and John Stuart Mill had grown up in this logical atmosphere of analysis, and to much profit as his works show. But when he turned the microscope on his own states of feeling, and on the aims of his life, the result was melancholia--almost disease of mind. His grandly developed faculty of analysis when devoted to definite knowledge outside himself, produced splendid results, as in his Logic, and his Essays, but when he analysed himself, he gained no additional knowledge, but a strange morbid horror that all possible musical changes might be exhausted, and that there might be no means of creating fresh ones. He also feared that should all the reforms he, and others, worked for, be accomplished, the lives of the reformers would become meaningless and blank, since they were working for means, not ends in themselves. Out of this hopeless mental condition there was only one outlet possible, and that was to leave self-analysis of this sort alone for ever, and to throw himself into its direct contrary, the unconscious life of the emotions. John Stuart Mill did this, and it saved him. In Wordsworth's poetry he found sanity and healing. Happily for him that was not the age of Browning's "Fifine at the Fair." Had he fallen in with dialectical analysis in the garb of poetry, it must have killed him!