at least fifty feet high. I saw it flaming in imagination, and when
half of it was burnt, the mourners would have to take to the boats, so
intense would be the heat. What a splendid spectacle! Never did any
man imagine a more splendid funeral! It would be a pity if the law
obliged me to forgo it. But there was no use hoping that the law would
not; there was a law against the burning of human remains, and I might
have to fall back on the Public Crematorium: it only remained for me
to decide what I would wish to be done with the ashes. In a moment of
happy inspiration I conceived the idea of a Greek vase as the only
suitable repository for my ashes, and I began to remember all the
Greek vases I had seen: all are beautiful, even the Roman Greek; these
are sometimes clumsy and heavy, but the sculpture is finely designed
and executed. Any Greek vase I decided would satisfy me, provided, of
course, that the relief represented Bacchanals dancing, and nearly
every Greek vase is decorated in this way. The purchase of the vase
would be an additional expense; no doubt I was running my brother in
for a good deal of money; it is becoming more and more difficult to
buy original Greek sculpture! and in a moment of posthumous parsimony
my thoughts turned to a copy of a Greek vase in granite, granite being
more durable than marble, and I wanted the vase to last for a long
time. It was delightful to take a sheet of paper and a pencil and to
draw all that I remembered of the different vases I had seen,
different riots of lusty men carrying horns of wine, intermingled with
graceful girls dancing gracefully, youths playing on pipes, and amidst
them fauns, the lovely animality of the woods, of the landscape ages,
when men first began to milk their goats, and when one man out of the
tribe, more pensive, more meditative than the others, went down to the
river's bank and cut a reed and found music within it. The vase I
remembered best has upright handles springing from the necks of swans.
It stands about two feet high, perhaps a little more, and its cavity
should be capable of containing all that remains of me after my
burning. None would have thought, from the happy smile upon my lips,
that I was thinking of a Grecian urn and a little pile of white ashes.
"O death, where is thy sting?" I murmured, and the pencil dropped from
my hand, for my memory was more beautiful than anything I could
realise upon paper. I could only remember one side of a youth, that
side of him next to an impulsive maiden; her delight gives her wings;
his left arm is about her shoulder. She is more impulsive than he, and
I wondered at his wistfulness--whether he was thinking of another love
or a volume of poems that he loved better. Little by little many of
the figures in the dance were remembered, for the sculpture was so
well done that the years had only clouded my memory. The clouds
dispersed, and I saw this time one whole figure, that of a
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