n tell me how it is
that they are never able to escape from little obelisks, dwarf pillars,
and urns for ashes? Instead of your thousand forms of which you boast, I
have never seen anything but a thousand repetitions."

"It is very generally so with us," returned the Architect, "but it is
not universal; and very likely the right taste and the proper
application of it may be a peculiar art. In this case especially we have
this great difficulty, that the monument must be something cheerful and
yet commemorate a solemn subject; while its matter is melancholy, it
must not itself be melancholy. As regards designs for monuments of all
kinds, I have collected numbers of them, and I will take some
opportunity of showing them to you; but at all times the fairest
memorial of a man remains some likeness of himself. This better than
anything else, will give a notion of what he was; it is the best text
for many or for few notes, only it ought to be made when he is at his
best age, and that is generally neglected; no one thinks of preserving
forms while they are alive, and if it is done at all, it is done
carelessly and incompletely; and then comes death; a cast is taken
swiftly of the face; this mask is set upon a block of stone, and that is
what is called a bust. How seldom is the artist in a position to put any
real life into such things as these!"

"You have contrived," said Charlotte, "without perhaps knowing it or
wishing it, to lead the conversation altogether in my favor. The
likeness of a man is quite independent; everywhere that it stands, it
stands for itself, and we do not require it to mark the site of a
particular grave. But I must acknowledge to you to having a strange
feeling; even to likenesses I have a kind of disinclination. Whenever I
see them they seem to be silently reproaching me. They point to
something far away from us--gone from us; and they remind me how
difficult it is to pay right honor to the present. If we think how many
people we have seen and known, and consider how little we have been to
them and how little they have been to us, it is no very pleasant
reflection. We have met a man of genius without having enjoyed much with
him--a learned man without having learnt from him--a traveler without
having been instructed,--a man to love without having shown him any
kindness.

"And, unhappily, this is not the case only with accidental meetings.
Societies and families behave in the same way toward their de