the military life; for
indeed the rigidly logical tendency of his mind always leads him out
upon the practical. Don't misunderstand me! At present, he is
strenuous only intellectually; and has given no definite sign of
preference, as regards a vocation in life. But he seems to me to be
one practical in this sense, that his theorems will shape life for him,
directly; that he will always seek, as a matter of course, the
effective equivalent to--the line of being which shall be the proper
continuation of--his line of thinking. This intellectual rectitude, or
candour, which to my mind has a kind of beauty in it, has reacted upon
myself, I confess, with a searching quality." That "searching
quality," indeed, many others also, people far from being intellectual,
had experienced--an agitation of mind in his neighbourhood, oddly at
variance with the composure of the young man's manner and surrounding,
so jealously preserved.

In the crowd of spectators at the skating, whose eyes followed, so
well-satisfied, the movements of Sebastian van Storck, were the mothers
[84] of marriageable daughters, who presently became the suitors of
this rich and distinguished youth, introduced to them, as now grown to
man's estate, by his delighted parents. Dutch aristocracy had put
forth all its graces to become the winter morn: and it was
characteristic of the period that the artist tribe was there, on a
grand footing,--in waiting, for the lights and shadows they liked best.
The artists were, in truth, an important body just then, as a natural
consequence of the nation's hard-won prosperity; helping it to a full
consciousness of the genial yet delicate homeliness it loved, for which
it had fought so bravely, and was ready at any moment to fight anew,
against man or the sea. Thomas de Keyser, who understood better than
any one else the kind of quaint new Atticism which had found its way
into the world over those waste salt marshes, wondering whether quite
its finest type as he understood it could ever actually be seen there,
saw it at last, in lively motion, in the person of Sebastian van
Storck, and desired to paint his portrait. A little to his surprise,
the young man declined the offer; not graciously, as was thought.

Holland, just then, was reposing on its laurels after its long contest
with Spain, in a short period of complete wellbeing, before troubles of
another kind should set in. That a darker time might return again, was
cl