The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel
known in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be
represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural
description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real
distinction. In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery.
But the record of such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as
happens with Amiel, we feel that there has been, and with success, an
intellectual [26] effort to get at the secret, the precise motive,
of the pleasure; to define feeling, in this matter. Here is a good
description of an effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners
resident in London:
"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own--a grace, a dreamy charm. It
does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the
mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun,
as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us;
mist draws us together and concentrates us--it is cordial, homely,
charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the
epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism
is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors.
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