Now, it must be owned that, at his first glimpse of the countenance
which was bowing and smiling from the barouche, Ernest did fancy that
there was a resemblance between it and the old familiar face upon the
mountainside. The brow, with its massive depth and loftiness, and all
the other features, indeed, were boldly and strongly hewn, as if in
emulation of a more than heroic, of a Titanic model. But the sublimity
and stateliness, the grand expression of a divine sympathy, that
illuminated the mountain visage and etherealized its ponderous granite
substance into spirit, might here be sought in vain. Something had been
originally left out, or had departed. And therefore the marvellously
gifted statesman had always a weary gloom in the deep caverns of his
eyes, as of a child that has outgrown its playthings or a man of mighty
faculties and little aims, whose life, with all its high performances,
was vague and empty, because no high purpose had endowed it with
reality.

Still, Ernest's neighbor was thrusting his elbow into his side, and
pressing him for an answer.

'Confess! confess! Is not he the very picture of your Old Man of the
Mountain?'

'No!' said Ernest, bluntly, 'I see little or no likeness.'

'Then so much the worse for the Great Stone Face!' answered his
neighbor; and again he set up a shout for Old Stony Phiz.

But Ernest turned away, melancholy, and almost despondent: for this
was the saddest of his disappointments, to behold a man who might have