“Pourtant console-toi! pense, dans tes alarmes, Qu’un double bien te reste, espoir et souvenir; Une main dans le ciel pour essuyer tes larmes; Une main ici-bas, enfant, pour te bénir.”
The last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them is there much poetical promise. But the pathetic image of a forlorn and orphaned childhood, “_un nid que la foudre a brisé_,” which it calls up, and the tone of brotherly affection, linger in one’s memory. And through much of the volume of 1863, in the verses to “My Godson,” or in the charming poem to Loulou, the little girl who at five years old, daisy in hand, had sworn him eternal friendship over Gretchen’s game of “_Er liebt mich--liebt mich nicht_,” one hears the same tender note.
“Merci, prophétique fleurette, Corolle à l’oracle vainqueur, Car voilà trois ans, paquerette, Que tu m’ouvris un petit coeur.
“Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle, L’enfant aux grands yeux de velours Maintient son petit coeur fidèle, Fidèle comme aux premiers jours.”
His last poetical volume, “Jour à Jour,” published in 1880, is far more uniformly melancholy and didactic in tone than the two earlier collections from which we have been quoting. But though the dominant note is one of pain and austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion, and the general tone more purely introspective, there are many traces in it of the younger Amiel, dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to his sisters and his friends. And, in general, the pathetic interest of the book for all whose sympathy answers to what George Sand calls “_les tragédies que la pensée aperçoit et que l’oeil ne voit point_” is very great. Amiel published it a year before his death, and the struggle with failing power which the Journal reveals to us in its saddest and most intimate reality, is here expressed in more reserved and measured form. Faith, doubt, submission, tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration, moral passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is the life of the religious soul--they are all here, and the _Dernier Mot_ with which the sad little volume ends is poor Amiel’s epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell to that more public aspect of his life in which he had suffered much and achieved comparatively so little.