embled outwardly, a Catholic from Brabant, had
had saints in her family, and from time to time the mind of Sebastian
had been occupied on the subject of monastic life, its quiet, its
negation. The portrait of a certain Carthusian prior, which, like the
famous statue of Saint Bruno, the first Carthusian, in the church of
Santa Maria degli Angeli at Rome, could it have spoken, would have
said, "Silence!" kept strange company with the painted visages of men
of affairs. A great theological strife was then raging in Holland.
Grave ministers of religion assembled sometimes, as in the painted
scene by Rembrandt, in the Burgomaster's house, and once, not however
in their company, came a renowned young Jewish divine, Baruch de
Spinosa, with whom, most unexpectedly, Sebastian found himself in
sympathy, meeting the young Jew's far-reaching thoughts half-way, to
the confirmation of his own; and he did not know that his visitor, very
ready with the pencil, had taken his likeness as they talked on the
fly-leaf of his note-book. Alive to that theological disturbance in the
air all around him, he refused to be moved by it, as essentially a
strife on small matters, anticipating a vagrant regret which may have
visited many other minds since, the regret, namely, that the old,
pensive, use-and-wont Catholicism, which had accompanied the nation's
earlier struggle for existence, and consoled it therein, had been taken
from it. And for himself, indeed, what impressed him in that old
Catholicism was a kind of lull in it--a lulling power--like that of the
monotonous organ-music, which Holland, Catholic or not, still so
greatly loves. But what he could not away with in the Catholic religion
was its unfailing drift towards the concrete--the positive imageries of
a faith, so richly beset with persons, things, historical incidents.

Rigidly logical in the method of his inferences, he attained the poetic
quality only by the audacity with which he conceived the whole sublime
extension of his premises. The contrast was a strange one between the
careful, the almost petty fineness of his personal surrounding--all the
elegant conventionalities of life, in that rising Dutch family--and the
mortal coldness of a temperament, the intellectual tendencies of which
seemed to necessitate straightforward flight from all that was
positive. He seemed, if one may say so, in love with death; preferring
winter to summer; finding only a tranquillising influence in the