The frosty ways like iron, The branches plumed with snow, And a crumb of bread for Robin, SONG O SPIRIT of the Summertime! Bring back the singing; and the scent HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL, Swiss poet and philosopher. Born of Huguenot stock, in Geneva, September 27, 1821. Educated in Germany, he became Professor of Esthetics, Moral Philosophy, and of French Literature at the Academy in Geneva. Author of "The Literary Movement in Romanish Switzerland," "A Study of Madame de Staël," and a volume of poems, "Millet Grains." After his death, May 11, 1881, portions of his Private Journal, published in 1882, attracted instant attention, as the revelation of a lofty, highly sensitive, and poetic spirit. 9th August, 1859. more so. (From the "JOURNAL") Nature is forgetful: the world is almost However little the individual may lend himself to it, oblivion soon covers him like a shroud. This rapid and inexorable expansion of the universal life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual being, which effaces our existence, and annuls all memory of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. To be born, to struggle, to disappear - there is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and not even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the water, or a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is life! Like a dream which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my past, all my present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my consciousness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel myself then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing. My travels, my reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes, have faded from my mind. It is a singular state. All my faculties drop away from me like a cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva. I feel myself returning into a more elementary form. I behold my own unclothing; I forget, still more than I am forgotten; I pass gently into the grave while still living, and I feel, as it were, the indescribable peace of annihilation, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious of the river of time passing before and in me, of the impalpable shadows of life gliding past me, but nothing breaks the cataleptic tranquillity which enwraps me. I come to understand the Buddhist trance of the Soufis, the kief of the Turk, the "ecstasy" of the Orientals, — and yet I am conscious all the time that the pleasure of it is deadly, that, like the use of opium or of haschish, it is a kind of slow suicide, inferior in all respects to the joys of action, to the sweetness of love, to the beauty of enthusiasm, to the sacred savor of accomplished duty. 17th April, 1860. The cloud has lifted: I am better. I have been able to take my usual walk on the Treille; all the buds were opening and the young shoots were green on all the branches. The rippling of clear water, the merriment of birds, the young freshness of plants, and the noisy play of children, produce a strange effect upon an invalid. Or rather it was strange to me to be looking at such things with the eyes of a - sick and dying man; it was my first introduction to a new phase of experience. There is a deep sadness in it. One feels oneself cut off from nature, outside her communion as it were. She is strength and joy and eternal health. “Room for the living," she cries to us; "do not come to darken my blue sky with your miseries; each has his turn: begone!" But to strengthen our own courage, we must say to ourselves, No; it is good for the world to see suffering and weakness; the sight adds zest to the joy of the happy and the careless, and is rich in warning for all who think. Life has been lent to us, and we owe it to our traveling companions to let them see what use we make of it to the end. We must show our brethren both how to live and how to die. These first summonses of illness have besides a divine value; they give us glimpses behind the scenes of life; they teach us something of its awful reality and its inevitable end. They teach us sympathy. They warn us to redeem the time while it is yet day. They awaken in us gratitude for the blessings which are still ours, and humility for the gifts which are in us. So that, evils though they seem, they are really an appeal to us from on high, a touch of God's fatherly Scourge. How frail a thing is health, and what a thin envelope protects our life against being swallowed up from without or disorganized from within! A breath, and the boat springs a leak or founders; a nothing, and all is endangered; a passing cloud, and all is darkness! Life is indeed Life is indeed a flower which a morning withers and the beat of a passing wing breaks down; it is the widow's lamp, which the slightest blast of air extinguishes. In order to realize the poetry which clings to morning roses, one needs to have just escaped from the claws of that vulture which we call illness. The foundation and the heightening of all things is the graveyard. The only certainty in this world of vain agitations and endless anxieties, is the certainty of death, and that which is the foretaste and small change of deathpain. As long as we turn our eyes away from this implacable reality, the tragedy of life remains hidden from us. As soon as we look at it face to face, the true proportions of everything reappear, and existence becomes solemn again. It is made clear to us that we have been frivolous and petulant, intractable and forgetful, and that we have been wrong. We must die and give an account of our life: here in all its simplicity is the teaching of sickness! "Do with all diligence what you have to do; reconcile yourself with the law of the universe; think of your duty; prepare yourself for departure:". such is the cry of conscience and of reason. 5th May, 1860. To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to renounce a good once and for all, costs less than to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail. To bear with one's own decay, to accept one's own lessening capacity, is a harder and rarer virtue than to face death. There is a halo round tragic and premature death; there is but a long sadness in declining strength. But look closer: so studied, a resigned and religious old age will often move us more than the heroic ardor of young years. The maturity of the soul is worth more than the first brilliance of its faculties, or the plenitude of its strength, and the eternal in us can but profit from all the ravages made by time. There is comfort in this thought. 16th November, 1864. Heard of the death of ——. - Will and intelligence lasted till there was an effusion on the brain which stopped everything. A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence! Fragility, appearance, nothingness. If it were not for our powers of self-detraction and forgetfulness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us would seem to us but a broken specter in the darkness, an empty appearance, a fleeting hallucination. Appeared - disappeared there is the whole history of a man, or of a world, or of an infusoria. Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea. The eye does not see a sphere all at once although the sphere exists all at once. Either the sphere must turn before the eye which is looking at it, or the eye must go round the sphere. In the first case it is the world which unrolls, or seems to unroll in time: in the second case it is our thought which successively analyzes and recomposes. For the supreme intelligence there is no time; what will be, is. Time and space are fragments of the Infinite for the use of finite creatures. God permits them, that He may not be alone. They are the mode under which creatures are possible and conceivable. Let us add that they are also the Jacob's ladder of innumerable steps by which the creation reascends to its Creator, participates in being, tastes of life, perceives the absolute, and can adore the fathomless mystery of the infinite divinity. That is the other side of the question. Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal. To escape by the ecstasy of inward vision from the whirlwind of time, to see oneself sub specie eternitatis, is the word of command of all the great religions of the higher races; and this psychological possibility is the foundation of all great hopes. The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise towards that which is neither born nor dies, towards that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say, towards God. To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song. 28th January, 1881. - A terrible night. For three or four hours I struggled against suffocation and looked death in the face. ... It is clear that what awaits me is suffocation asphyxia. I shall die by choking. I should not have chosen such a death; but when there is no option, one must simply resign oneself, and at once. Spinoza expired in the presence of the doctor whom he had sent for. I must familiarize myself with the idea of dying unexpectedly, some fine night, strangled by laryngitis. The last sigh of a patriarch surrounded by his kneeling family is more |