“Sebastian van Storck” is an astonishing contrast to the last. The _motif_ of the essay is devotion to the purest and most abstract reason. Sebastian is a young Hollander, the son of a Burgomaster of wealth and high social position. The young Sebastian, a graceful finished nature, but with a strain of phthisis in his constitution, is a lonely, isolated young man, out of sympathy with the rich, phlegmatic, easy life which surrounds him, who is drawn into a track of abstract intellectual speculation, partly by a certain mortal coldness of temperament, and partly by a clear and logical faculty of thought. He becomes interested in the philosophy of the young Spinoza, who is a friend and contemporary, and he sets out upon a chilly pilgrimage of thought with a kind of intellectual disinterestedness, till he arrives at the conclusion that the only use to make of life is to cultivate a severe detachment from all its interests and ties. His view of God becomes ever colder and more impersonal. “For him, that one abstract being was as the pallid Arctic sun, disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacier, a barren and absolutely lonely sea. The lively purpose of life had been frozen out of it. What he must admire, and love if he could, was ‘equilibrium,’ the void, the _tabula rasa_, into which, through all those apparent energies of man and nature, that in truth are but forces of disintegration, the world was really settling. And, himself a mere circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the clay of the potter was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect to be ‘loved in return.’” The crisis comes by his being almost drawn into a marriage with a beautiful girl of his own circle. He has to a certain extent submitted to her charm, and the betrothal is looked upon as an event daily to be expected. The girl herself falls under the spell of Sebastian’s beauty and fascination; and at a social gathering at which the friends of both expect and desire the pledge to be given and accepted, she betrays a certain innocent coquetry, which in Sebastian’s tense mood acts like water dashed in his face. He is filled with a sharp disgust and flies from home, taking refuge in a lonely manor-house, the property of his family. A spell of stormy weather succeeds and the land is inundated. When at last it is possible to reach the lonely house through the raging flood Sebastian is found dead, having apparently lost his life in saving a child, who is discovered unhurt wrapped in Sebastian’s furs.