But what he could not away with in the Catholic religion was its
unfailing drift towards the concrete--the positive imageries of a
faith, so richly beset with persons, things, historical incidents.
Rigidly logical in the method of his inferences, he attained the
poetic quality only by the audacity with which he conceived the whole
sublime extension of his premises. The contrast was a strange one
between the careful, the almost petty fineness of his personal
surrounding--all the elegant conventionalities of life, in that
rising Dutch family--and the mortal coldness of a temperament, the
intellectual tendencies of which seemed to necessitate
straightforward flight from all that was positive. He seemed, if one
may say so, in love with death; preferring winter to summer; finding
only a tranquillising influence in the thought of the earth beneath
our feet cooling down for ever [99] from its old cosmic heat;
watching pleasurably how their colours fled out of things, and the
long sand-bank in the sea, which had been the rampart of a town, was
washed down in its turn. One of his acquaintance, a penurious young
poet, who, having nothing in his pockets but the imaginative or
otherwise barely potential gold of manuscript verses, would have
grasped so eagerly, had they lain within his reach, at the elegant
outsides of life, thought the fortunate Sebastian, possessed of every
possible opportunity of that kind, yet bent only on dispensing with
it, certainly a most puzzling and comfortless creature.
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