revealed in its own distinct and actual being by a witness which, if truthful, must be as generous as stern. It is the immortal and inevitable “Thou Thyself” of which Rossetti sings: “I am Thyself—what hast thou done to me? —And Thou Thyself to all eternity!” Yet if we may risk a paradox, it is precisely in the _reality_ that there lies the _potentiality_ of the life within; behind the physical _is_ abides the spiritual _may be_; the “everlasting no” of the uncompromising realist, sifting, limiting, and analyzing down the human unit into bare and rigid matter, often conceals the hidden hope and promise of the idealist’s “everlasting yea.” Hence a great portrait is charged to the full with latent possibilities of character and destiny. It suggests forces as well as phenomena, causes as well as effects, inherent tendencies as well as facts. Someone has said that a human face should be either a promise or a history. The definition is too narrow. Every face, save perhaps in childhood, and not always with that exception, contains both promise and history inextricably blended each with each. A great portrait must be passionately personal, intensely individual; presenting one single, complete, and separate identity to the eye and mind, and yet in a very real sense _im_personal, having a certain universal, humanitarian significance. For the artist’s hand sets the human unit in its place in the great Family; lifts it on to the broad planes of the world’s common life. As his eye sees all things, like Spinoza, _sub specie eternitatis_—sees Time in the light of Eternity—so it sees one Man in the light of Humanity. He knows no isolations of being, conceives no man as “living to himself;” but is concerned ever with relationships and imperative sympathies between the subject of his portrait and the rest of mankind; so that the personality that looks forth from his canvas, faithfully and profoundly interpreted by his own, has in it the elements of appeal and challenge, and sends out a radiance of vitality to its spiritual kin.