The modest contribution to the literature of introspection of Genevan-born poet and diarist Henri-Frédéric Amiel is of special interest to the student of the esprit of Romantic and Victorian sensibility in the mid to late nineteenth century. First published posthumously as Fragments d'un journal intime (1882; translated as Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel, 1885) by friend and critic Edmond Scherer and subsequently translated into English by Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Amiel's journal struck a responsive chord in such varied readers and commentators as Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, Leo Tolstoy, André Gide, Charles Du Bos, Walter Pater, and Joseph Conrad. Many readers, such as Arnold and Pater, saw figured in its pages what John Middleton Murry in Countries of the Mind (1931) calls "a microcosm of the moral effort and moral perturbation of a century in which moral effort and perturbation...