He cared nothing, indeed,
for the warm sandbanks of Wynants, nor for those eerie relics of the
ancient Dutch woodland which survive in Hobbema and Ruysdael, still
less for the highly-coloured [89] sceneries of the academic band at
Rome, in spite of the escape they provide one into clear breadth of
atmosphere. For though Sebastian van Storck refused to travel, he
loved the distant--enjoyed the sense of things seen from a distance,
carrying us, as on wide wings of space itself, far out of one's
actual surrounding. His preference in the matter of art was,
therefore, for those prospects a vol a'oiseau--of the caged bird on
the wing at last--of which Rubens had the secret, and still more
Philip de Koninck, four of whose choicest works occupied the four
walls of his chamber; visionary escapes, north, south, east, and
west, into a wide-open though, it must be confessed, a somewhat
sullen land. For the fourth of them he had exchanged with his mother
a marvellously vivid Metsu, lately bequeathed to him, in which she
herself was presented. They were the sole ornaments he permitted
himself. From the midst of the busy and busy-looking house, crowded
with the furniture and the pretty little toys of many generations, a
long passage led the rare visitor up a winding staircase, and (again
at the end of a long passage) he found himself as if shut off from
the whole talkative Dutch world, and in the embrace of that wonderful
quiet which is also possible in Holland at its height all around him.
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