_Gottlieb._ See here! "He has been accustomed," he writes, "to have Canova's women about him, in stone, and the world's women beside him, in flesh; these being as much below, as those above, his soul's aspiration; 60 but now he is to have the reality." There you laugh again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth. _1st Student._ Schramm! (Take the pipe out of his mouth, somebody!) Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth? 65 _Schramm._ Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world: look at a blossom--it drops presently, having done its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed, and where would be the blossom's place could it continue? As well affirm that your eye is no longer in your body, 70 because its earliest favorite, whatever it may have first loved to look on, is dead and done with--as that any affection is lost to the soul when its first object, whatever happened first to satisfy it, is superseded in due course. Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the 75 mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?--there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men?--there's God to wonder at; and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with 80 respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one. Thus-- _1st Student._ Put Schramm's pipe into his mouth again! There you see! Well, this Jules--a wretched fribble --oh, I watched his disportings at Possagno, the other 85 day! Canova's gallery--you know: there he marches first resolvedly past great works by the dozen without vouchsafing an eye; all at once he stops full at the _Psiche-fanciulla_--cannot pass that old acquaintance without a nod of encouragement--"In your new place, beauty? 90 Then behave yourself as well here as at Munich--I see you!" Next he posts himself deliberately before the unfinished _Pieta_ for half an hour without moving, till up he starts of a sudden, and thrusts his very nose into--I say, into--the group; by which gesture you are informed that 95 precisely the sole point he had not fully mastered in Canova's practice was a certain method of using the drill in the articulation of the knee-joint--and that, likewise, has he mastered at length! Good-by, therefore, to poor Canova--whose gallery no longer needs detain his successor 100 Jules, the predestinated novel thinker in marble! _5th Student._ Tell him about the women; go on to the women!