It was the fatal year of 1672, when Holland seemed crushed by the invasion of Louis XIV. Assuredly his fatherland had not spoiled Swammerdam; but nevertheless it was the native home of science, of free reason, the asylum of human thought. And lo! she sank, engulfed by the hosts of the French; engulfed in the ocean which she had summoned to her assistance. She lived only by committing suicide. Did she live? Yes; but to be thenceforth no more than the shadow of her former greatness. [Illustration] The infinite melancholy of such a change has had its painter and its poet in Ruysdaël, who was born and who died in Swammerdam's time, and, like him, at the age of forty. When I contemplate in the Louvre the inestimable picture which that Museum possesses of him, the one leads me to think of the other. The little man who followed the gloomy route of the dunes at the approach of the storm reminds me of my insect-hunter; and the sublime marine picture of the palisade in the red-brown waters, chafing so terribly, and electrified by the tempest, seems a dramatic expression of the moral tempests which poor Swammerdam experienced when he wrote "The Ephemera"--"among tears and sobs." The Ephemera is the fly which is born but to die, living a single hour of love. But Swammerdam did not enjoy that hour; and it seems as if he spent his too brief life in a state of complete isolation. At the age of thirty-six he was already drawing near his end. The depths of imagination and universal tenderness in his nature could not be alimented by the barren controversies of the age. In this condition there accidentally fell into his hand an unknown work,--a woman's book. This sweet voice spoke to his very soul, and somewhat consoled him. It was one of the _opuscula_ of a celebrated mystic of that age, Mademoiselle Bourignon. Poor as was Swammerdam, he undertook a pilgrimage to Germany, where she resided, and went to see his consoler. He found in the journey a very real assistance in escaping at the least from his contention with the _savants_, his rivals, in forgetting every collision, and in remitting to God alone his defence and his discoveries.