Just so is there drawn through Ottilie Is diary, a thread of attachment and affection which connects it all together, and characterizes the whole.  And thus these remarks, these observations, these extracted sentences, and whatever else it may contain, were, to the writer, of peculiar meaning.  Even the few separate pieces which we select and transcribe will sufficiently explain our meaning.

FROM OTTILIE’S DIARY

“To rest hereafter at the side of those whom we love is the most delightful thought which 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?”