He was accustomed to speak of his four
years at Berlin as 'his intellectual phase,' and one felt that he
inclined to regard them as the happiest period of his life. The spell
which Berlin laid upon him lasted long." Probably his happiness in
Germany was partly owing to a sense of reaction against Geneva. There
are signs that he had felt himself somewhat isolated at school and
college, and that in the German world his special individuality, with
its dreaminess and its melancholy, found congenial surroundings far more
readily than had been the case in the drier and harsher atmosphere of
the Protestant Rome. However this may be, it is certain that German
thought took possession of him, that he became steeped not only in
German methods of speculation, but in German modes of expression, in
German forms of sentiment, which clung to him through life, and vitally
affected both his opinions and his style. M. Renan and M. Bourget shake
their heads over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a
certain "barbarous" air to many passages of the Journal. But both admit
that Amiel's individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force to
that intermingling of German with French elements, of which there are
such abundant traces in the "Journal Intime." Amiel, in fact, is one
more typical product of a movement which is certainly of enormous
importance in the history of modern thought, even though we may not be
prepared to assent to all the sweeping terms in which a writer like M.
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