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.
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