Sebastian would let his thoughts stray, without check, for a time. His
mother, whom he much resembled 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 [98] 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