Thus, this surpassing master in all the works of patient inquiry, this insatiable observer of the most minute details, who pursued Nature so far into the imperceptible, was a poetic soul, a man of imagination, one of those mournful spirits who groan after nothing less than the infinite, and die because they fail to conquer it. His was a remarkable combination of mental endowments which, at the first glance, seem opposed to one another: a love of the great, and a taste for the subtlest researches; a sublimity of aim, and that obstinacy of analysis which would subdivide the atom, and yet never cry, "Hold, enough!" But, in reality, are these qualities of so contradictory a nature? By no means. Men whose hearts are filled with the love of Nature will declare that they harmonize admirably. Nothing great and nothing little. For the lover a simple hair is worth as much as, frequently more than, a world. He was born in a cabinet of natural history; and his birth decided his destiny. The cabinet, formed by his father, an apothecary of Amsterdam, was a pell-mell, a chaos. The child wished to arrange it, and drew up a catalogue of it. A modest ambition led him from point to point, until he became the greatest naturalist of the century. His father was one of the zealot collectors who then became common in Holland--insatiable treasurers of diverse rarities. It was not with pictures--though Rembrandt was then in his glory--it was not with antiquities, that he filled his house. But all that the ships brought back from the two Indies of minerals, plants, fantastic and extraordinary animals, he acquired at any cost, and heaped up in piles. These marvels of the unknown world, contrasting by their splendour and tropical magnificence with the gloomy climate which received them and the pale sea of the North, aroused in the young Hollander's mind a lively curiosity and a passionate devotion to Nature. A very good Dutch painter has drawn a charming picture of the young Grotius: a universal scholar at twelve years of age, surrounded by folios, maps, charts, and all the appliances of learning. How much I should have preferred that the same artist--or rather the all-powerful magician, Rembrandt--had revealed to us the mysterious study, that brilliant chaos of the three kingdoms, and the young Swammerdam endeavouring to grasp the grand enigma! The crowds and prodigious movement of Amsterdam favoured his solitude. The Babylons of commerce are for the thinker profound deserts. In that dumb ocean of men of mercantile activity, on the border of sluggish canals, he lived almost like Robinson Crusoe in his island. Isolated even in the midst of his family, who could not comprehend him, he seldom emerged from his cabinet, and descended on the fewest possible occasions into the paternal shop. [Illustration]