So genially attempered, so warm, was life become, in the land of
which Pliny had spoken as scarcely dry land at all. And, in truth,
the sea which Sebastian so much loved, and with so great a
satisfaction and sense of wellbeing in every hint of its nearness, is
never far distant in Holland. Invading all places, stealing under
one's feet, insinuating itself everywhere along an endless network of
canals (by no means such formal channels as we understand by the
name, but picturesque rivers, with sedgy banks and [93] haunted by
innumerable birds) its incidents present themselves oddly even in
one's park or woodland walks; the ship in full sail appearing
suddenly among the great trees or above the garden wall, where we had
no suspicion of the presence of water. In the very conditions of
life in such a country there was a standing force of pathos. The
country itself shared the uncertainty of the individual human life;
and there was pathos also in the constantly renewed, heavily-taxed
labour, necessary to keep the native soil, fought for so unselfishly,
there at all, with a warfare that must still be maintained when that
other struggle with the Spaniard was over. But though Sebastian
liked to breathe, so nearly, the sea and its influences, those were
considerations he scarcely entertained. In his passion for
Schwindsucht--we haven't the word--he found it pleasant to think of
the resistless element which left, one hardly a foot-space amidst the
yielding sand; of the old beds of lost rivers, surviving now only as
deeper channels in the sea; of the remains of a certain ancient town,
which within men's memory had lost its few remaining inhabitants,
and, with its already empty tombs, dissolved and disappeared in the
flood.
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