es me fancy that his ultimate destination
may be 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
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 darke