“AMONG TEARS AND SOBS.” 
137 
roof, lie made an effort to seek out this friend and remind him of his 
offer; but he remembered it no longer. 
Misfortunes now accumulated upon his head. Poor and infirm, and 
dragging himself along the streets of Amsterdam with a large collection 
which he knew not where to store away, he received another terrible 
shock—the ruin of his country. The earth sunk under his feet. 
It was the fatal year of 1672, when Holland seemed crushed by the 
invasion of Louis XIY. 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 sum¬ 
moned 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. 
The infinite melancholy of such a change has had its painter and 
its poet in Ruysdael, 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 pali¬ 
sade 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” — 
“ amoncr tears and sobs.” 
O 
