His love of traveling never left him. Paris attracted him, as it attracts all who cling to letters, and he gained at one time or another a certain amount of acquaintance with French literary men. In 1852 we find him for a time brought into contact with Thierry, Lamennais, Béranger, Mignet, etc., as well as with Romantics like Alfred de Vigny and Théophile Gautier. There are poems addressed to De Vigny and Gautier in his first published volume of 1854. He revisited Italy and his old haunts and friends in Germany more than once, and in general kept the current of his life fresh and vigorous by his openness to impressions and additions from without.
He was, as we have said, a delightful correspondent, “taking pains with the smallest note,” and within a small circle of friends much liked. His was not a nature to be generally appreciated at its true value; the motives which governed his life were too remote from the ordinary motives of human conduct, and his characteristics just those which have always excited the distrust, if not the scorn, of the more practical and vigorous order of minds. Probably, too—especially in his later years—there was a certain amount of self-consciousness and artificiality in his attitude toward the outer world, which was the result partly of the social difficulties we have described, partly of his own sense of difference from his surroundings, and partly again of that timidity of nature, that self-distrust, which is revealed to us in the Journal. So that he was by no means generally popular, and the great success of the Journal is still a mystery to the majority of those who knew him merely as a fellow-citizen and acquaintance. But his friends loved him and believed in him, and the reserved student, whose manners were thought affected in general society, could and did make himself delightful to those who understood him, or those who looked to him for affection. “According to my remembrance of him,” writes M. Scherer, “he was bright, sociable, a charming companion. Others who knew him better and longer than I say the same. The mobility of his disposition counteracted his tendency to exaggerations of feeling. In spite of his fits of melancholy, his natural turn of mind was cheerful; up to the end he was young, a child even, amused by mere nothings; and whoever had heard him laugh his hearty student’s laugh would have found it difficult to identify him with the author of so many somber pages.” M. Rivier, his old pupil, remembers him as “strong and active, still handsome, delightful in conversation, ready to amuse and be amused.” Indeed, if the photographs of him are to be trusted, there must have been something specially attractive in the sensitive, expressive face, with its lofty brow, fine eyes, and kindly mouth. It is the face of a poet rather than of a student, and makes one understand certain other little points which his friends lay stress on—for instance, his love for and popularity with children.
In his poems, or at any rate in the earlier ones, this lighter side finds more expression, proportionally, than in the Journal. In the volume called “Grains de Mil,” published in 1854, and containing verse written between the ages of eighteen and thirty, there are poems addressed, now to his sister, now to old Genevese friends, and now to famous men of other countries whom he had seen and made friends with in passing, which, read side by side with the “Journal Intime,” bring a certain gleam and sparkle into an otherwise somber picture. Amiel was never a master of poetical form; his verse, compared to his prose, is tame and fettered; it never reaches the glow and splendor of expression which mark the finest passages of the Journal. It has ability, thought—beauty even, of a certain kind, but no plastic power, none of the incommunicable magic which a George Eliot seeks for in vain, while it comes unasked, to deck with imperishable charm the commonplace metaphysic and the simpler emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns. Still as Amiel’s work, his poetry has an interest for those who are interested in him. Sincerity is written in every line of it. Most of the thoughts and experiences with which one grows familiar in the Journal are repeated in it; the same joys, the same aspirations, the same sorrows are visible throughout it, so that in reading it one is more and more impressed with the force and reality of the inner life which has left behind it so definite an image of itself. And every now and then the poems add a detail, a new impression, which seems by contrast to give fresh value to the fine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of the Journal. Take these verses, written at twenty-one, to his younger sister:
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.