may say so, in love with death; preferring
winter to summer; finding only a tranquillising influence in the
thought of the earth beneath our feet cooling down for ever [99] from
its old cosmic heat; watching pleasurably how their colours fled out of
things, and the long sand-bank in the sea, which had been the rampart
of a town, was washed down in its turn. One of his acquaintance, a
penurious young poet, who, having nothing in his pockets but the
imaginative or otherwise barely potential gold of manuscript verses,
would have grasped so eagerly, had they lain within his reach, at the
elegant outsides of life, thought the fortunate Sebastian, possessed of
every possible opportunity of that kind, yet bent only on dispensing
with it, certainly a most puzzling and comfortless creature. A few
only, half discerning what was in his mind, would fain have shared his
intellectual clearness, and found a kind of beauty in this youthful
enthusiasm for an abstract theorem. Extremes meeting, his cold and
dispassionate detachment from all that is most attractive to ordinary
minds came to have the impressiveness of a great passion. And for the
most part, people had loved him; feeling instinctively that somewhere
there must be the justification of his difference from themselves. It
was like being in love: or it was an intellectual malady, such as
pleaded for forbearance, like bodily sickness, and gave at times a
resigned and touching sweetness to what he did and said. Only once, at
a moment of the wild popular excitement which at that period was easy
to provoke in Holland, there was a certain [100] group of persons who
would have shut him up as no well-wisher to, and perhaps a plotter
against, the common-weal. A single traitor might cut the dykes in an
hour, in the interest of the English or the French. Or, had he already
committed some treasonable act, who was so anxious to expose no writing
of his that he left his very letters unsigned, and there were little
stratagems to get specimens of his fair manuscript? For with all his
breadth of mystic intention, he was persistent, as the hours crept on,
to leave all the inevitable details of life at least in order, in
equation. And all his singularities appeared to be summed up in his
refusal to take his place in the life-sized family group (tres
distingue et tres soigne, remarks a modern critic of the work) painted
about this time. His mother expostulated with him on the matter:--she