ch man can have when once he looks out beyond the
boundary of life. What a sweet expression is that--'He was gathered to
his fathers!'"

"Of the various memorials and tokens which bring nearer to us the
distant and the separated--none is so satisfactory as a picture. To sit
and talk to a beloved picture, even though it be unlike, has a charm in
it, like the charm which there sometimes is in quarrelling with a
friend. We feel, in a strange sweet way, that we are divided and yet
cannot separate."

"We entertain ourselves often with a present person as with a picture.
He need not speak to us, he need not look at us, or take any notice of
us; we look at him, we feel the relation in which we stand to him; such
relation can even grow without his doing anything toward it, without his
having any feeling of it: he is to us exactly as a picture."

"One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows. I
have always felt for the portrait-painter on this account. One so seldom
requires of people what is impossible, and of them we do really require
what is impossible; they must gather up into their picture the relation
of every body to its subject, all their likings and all dislikings; they
must not only paint a man as they see him, but as every one else sees
him. It does not surprise me if such artists become by degrees stunted,
indifferent, and of but one idea; and indeed it would not matter what
came of it, if it were not that in consequence we have to go without the
pictures of so many persons near and dear to us."

"It is too true, the Architect's collection of weapons and old
implements, which were found with the bodies of their owners, covered in
with great hills of earth and rock, proves to us how useless is man's so
great anxiety to preserve his personality after he is dead; and so
inconsistent people are, the Architect confesses to have himself opened
these barrows of his forefathers, and yet goes on occupying himself with
memorials for posterity."

"But after all why should we take it so much to heart? Is all that we
do, done for eternity? Do we not put on our dress in the morning, to
throw it off again at night? Do we not go abroad to return home again?
And why should we not wish to rest by the side of our friends, though it
were but for a century?"

"When we see the many gravestones which have fallen in, which have been
defaced by the footsteps of the congregation, which lie buried under the
ruins of