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.

—­Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation, and in his features as special and definite an expression of his sole individuality as if he were the first created of his race:  As soon as we are old enough to get the range of three or four generations well in hand, and to take in large family histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor.  The analysis of a face into its ancestral elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space when Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after feature, from the slight outline to the finished portrait.

—­I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as identified with ourselves.  In early years, while the child “feels its life in every limb,” it lives in the body and for the body to a very great extent.  It ought to be so.  There have been many very interesting children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the things of earth and an extraordinary development of the spiritual nature.  There is a perfect literature of their biographies, all alike in their essentials; the same “disinclination to the usual amusements of childhood “; the same remarkable sensibility; the same docility; the same conscientiousness;