of the two, or something different from either. What the daguerreotype
and photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness. The
artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in repose,
puts your face through its exercises, observes its transitions, and
so gets the whole range of its expression. Out of all this he forms an
ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your exact look at any one time
or to any particular person. Such a portrait cannot be to everybody what
the ungloved call "as nat'ral as life." Every good picture, therefore,
must be considered wanting in resemblance by many persons.

There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist shapes
your features from his outline. It is that you resemble so many
relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular likeness
in your countenance.

He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances, thus:

There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I never
thought I had a sign of it. The mother's eyebrow and grayish-blue eye,
those I knew I had. But there is a something which recalls a smile that
faded away from my sister's lips--how many years ago! I thought it so
pleasant in her, that I love myself better for having a trace of it.

Are we not young? Are we not fresh and blooming? Wait, a bit. The artist
takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines, diverging
outwards from the eye over the temple. Five years.--The artist draws
one tolerably distinct and two faint lines, perpendicularly between the
eyebrows. Ten years.--The artist breaks up the contours round the mouth,
so that they look a little as a hat does that has been sat upon and
recovered itself, ready, as one would say, to crumple up again in the
same creases, on smiling or other change of feature.--Hold on! Stop
that! Give a young fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of that
interesting period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc.,
etc.?

There now! That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek. Is he not a POET that
painted us?

"Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
COWPER.

--