Henri-Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821. Orphaned of both his parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little bare and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in him early. His student days coming to an end, the years which followed, from 1842 to 1848--Wanderjahre, in which he visited Holland, Italy, Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany--seem to have been the happiest of his life. In 1849 he became a Professor at Geneva, and there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of outward events. He published some volumes of verse; to the last apparently still only feeling after his true literary metier. Those last seven years were a long struggle against the disease which ended his life, consumption, at the age of fifty-three. The first entry in his Journal is in 1848. From that date to his death, a period of over twenty-five years, this Journal was the real object of all the energies of his richly-endowed nature: and from its voluminous sheets his literary executors have selected the deeply interesting volumes now presented in English. With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy life--melancholy with something not altogether explained by the somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from a very early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire. You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many very various types of contemporary ability. The use of his book to cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality of their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects. He will write a page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and attainment which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have sufficed for an effective volume. Continually, in the Journal, we pause over things that would rank for beauties among widely differing models of the best French prose. He has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of Pascal. He had a right to compose "Thoughts": they have the force in them which makes up for their unavoidable want of continuity.