On May 3 it will have been five years since New Hampshire's beloved Old Man of the Mountain met his end. In "The Great Stone Face", a short story by writer and White Mountain regular Nathaniel Hawthorne, a young boy tells his mother he hopes that he will someday meet a man possessed of those very rugged, yet kindly features.

"If an old prophecy should come to pass," answered his mother, "we may see a man, some time or other, with exactly such a face as that." The prophecy, in the tale, was not fulfilled. What nature wrought on such a grand scale could not be duplicated in a man, and so it is with any attempt to recreate the wonder of the granite visage that's emblematic of New Hampshire. But the proposal by New Jersey architect Francis Treves to remake the Old Man in glass on Cannon Cliff comes close.

Monitor columnist Ray Duckler's story about Treves's grand scheme appeared on Monday. The plan is stunning, and if the panel of the American Institute of Architects who judged it a winner are right, technically possible to accomplish with enough money.

Treves's Old Man of Glass would shimmer, glow and change color with changes in the sun and sky. Visitors - by the many thousands he believes - would come from afar to view the attraction and get a chance to walk into his hollow head and peer over Franconia Notch to the mountains beyond as if through his eyes.

Treves wants the state committee created to select and fund a memorial to the Old Man on the banks of Profile Lake to scrap the plan it selected last year and adopt his, something the Old Man of the Mountain Legacy Fund is unlikely to do.

The plan the committee chose is creative, but compared to Treves's, quite modest. It calls for sculpting and erecting five great stones of quarried granite in a row that, when viewed from a given vantage point, recreate the face of the Old Man. Nearby, on the shore of the lake, a second memorial would consist of large steel pointers with irregular edges that visitors could line up to recreate the life-size image of the Old Man in his old spot on the face of Cannon Mountain.

The memorial was estimated to cost about $4.8 million. Initially, the committee hoped to have it in place in time for next week's Profile Awards Festival in Franconia Notch State Park. But after an initial outpouring of $800,000, donations fell off a cliff. The fund has not yet reached $1 million, and it's fair to wonder whether the memorial will ever be built.

A memorial would keep the memory of the Old Man alive, but love of the state symbol will die with the last generation to have looked up and seen that noble face jutting out of the mountain.

Treves faults the committee for not thinking big enough. Neat as it might be and big as the rocks are, the planned memorial will not instill wonder. Treves's Old Man would - and it would, we believe, lure tourists to New Hampshire by the thousands. But it would be a marvel akin to Mount Rushmore, a testament to what man, not nature, can do.

We'd love to see Treves's Old Man up there, but just for a day or maybe a week, before nature reclaimed The Notch. Manmade attractions, no matter how imaginative and bold, are not what the experience of visiting the biggest mountains in the East should be. Beauty as nature created it is.