ady, and might have been foreseen, in the premises. By a singular
perversity, it seemed to him that every one of those passing
"affections"--he too, alas! at times--was for ever trying to be, to
assert itself, to maintain its isolated and petty self, by a kind of
practical lie in things; although through every incident of its
hypothetic existence it had protested that its proper function was to
die. Surely! those transient affections marred the freedom, the truth,
the beatific calm, of the absolute selfishness, which could not, if it
would, pass beyond the circumference of itself; to which, at times,
with a fantastic sense of wellbeing, he was capable of a sort of
fanatical devotion. And those, as he conceived, were his moments of
genuine theoretic insight, in which, under the abstract "perpetual
light," he died to self; while the intellect, after all, had attained a
freedom of its own through the vigorous act which assured him that, as
nature was but a thought of his, so himself also was but the passing
thought of God.

No! rather a puzzle only, an anomaly, upon that one, white, unruffled
consciousness! His first principle once recognised, all the rest, the
whole array of propositions down to the [110] heartless practical
conclusion, must follow of themselves. Detachment: to hasten hence: to
fold up one's whole self, as a vesture put aside: to anticipate, by
such individual force as he could find in him, the slow disintegration
by which nature herself is levelling the eternal hills:--here would be
the secret of peace, of such dignity and truth as there could be in a
world which after all was essentially an illusion. For Sebastian at
least, the world and the individual alike had been divested of all
effective purpose. The most vivid of finite objects, the dramatic
episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant personalities which had found
their parts to play in them, that golden art, surrounding us with an
ideal world, beyond which the real world is discernible indeed, but
etherealised by the medium through which it comes to one: all this, for
most men so powerful a link to existence, only set him on the thought
of escape--means of escape--into a formless and nameless infinite
world, quite evenly grey. The very emphasis of those objects, their
importunity to the eye, the ear, the finite intelligence, was but the
measure of their distance from what really is. One's personal
presence, the presence, such as it is, of t