My horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, things,
countries, peoples, books; I have a greater mass of experiences." This
fact, indeed, of a wide and varied personal experience, must never be
forgotten in any critical estimate of Amiel as a man or writer. We may
so easily conceive him as a sedentary professor, with the ordinary
professorial knowledge, or rather ignorance, of men and the world,
falling into introspection under the pressure of circumstance, and for
want, as it were, of something else to think about. Not at all. The man
who has left us these microscopic analyses of his own moods and
feelings, had penetrated more or less into the social and intellectual
life of half a dozen European countries, and was familiar not only with
the books, but, to a large extent also, with the men of his generation.
The meditative and introspective gift was in him, not the product, but
the mistress of circumstance. It took from the outer world what that
world had to give, and then made the stuff so gained subservient to its
own ends.
Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at Berlin were
by far the most important. "It was at Heidelberg and Berlin," says M.
Scherer, "that the world of science and speculation first opened on the
dazzled eyes of the young man.
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