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 [84] 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.
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