We have been carried forward, however, a little too far by this general
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.
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