discussion of Amiel's debts to Germany. Let us take up the biographical
thread again. In 1848 his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, and he
returned to Geneva. "How many places, how many impressions,
observations, thoughts--how many forms of men and things--have passed
before me and in me since April, 1843," he writes in the Journal, two or
three months after his return. "The last seven years have been the most
important of my life; they have been the novitiate of my intelligence,
the initiation of my being into being." The first literary evidence of
his matured powers is to be found in two extremely interesting papers on
Berlin, which he contributed to the _Bibliotheque Universelle_ in 1848,
apparently just before he left Germany. Here for the first time we have
the Amiel of the "Journal Intime." The young man who five years before
had written his painstaking review of M. Rio is now in his turn a
master. He speaks with dignity and authority, he has a graphic, vigorous
prose at command, the form of expression is condensed and epigrammatic,
and there is a mixture of enthusiasm and criticism in his description of
the powerful intellectual machine then working in the Prussian capital
which represents a permanent note of character, a lasting attitude of
mind. A great deal, of course, in the two papers is technical and
statistic, but what there is of general comment and criticism is so good
that one is tempted to make some melancholy comparisons between them and
another article in the _Bibliotheque_, that on Adolphe Pictet, written
in 1856, and from which we have already quoted. In 1848 Amiel was for
awhile master of his powers and his knowledge; no fatal divorce had yet
taken place in him between the accumulating and producing faculties; he
writes readily even for the public, without labor, without affectations.
Eight years later the reflective faculty has outgrown his control;
composition, which represents the practical side of the intellectual
life, has become difficult and painful to him, and he has developed what
he himself calls "a wavering manner, born of doubt and scruple."