TO MY OWN PORTRAIT.
How is it that before mine eyes,
While gazing on thy mien,
All my past years of life arise,
As in a mirror seen?
What spell within thee hath been shrined
To image back my own deep mind?
Even as a song of other times
Can trouble memory’s springs;
Even as a sound of vesper-chimes
Can wake departed things;
Even as a scent of vernal flowers
Hath records fraught with vanish’d hours,—
Such power is thine! They come, the dead,
From the grave’s bondage free,
And smiling back the changed are led
To look in love on thee;
And voices that are music flown
Speak to me in the heart’s full tone:
Till crowding thoughts my soul oppress—
The thoughts of happier years—
And a vain gush of tenderness
O’erflows in child-like tears;
A passion which I may not stay,
A sudden fount that must have way.
But thou, the while—oh! almost strange,
Mine imaged self! it seems
That on thy brow of peace no change
Reflects my own swift dreams;
Almost I marvel not to trace
Those lights and shadows in thy face.
To see thee calm, while powers thus deep—
Affection, Memory, Grief—
Pass o’er my soul as winds that sweep
O’er a frail aspen leaf!
Oh, that the quiet of thine eye
Might sink there when the storm goes by!
Yet look thou still serenely on,
And if sweet friends there be
That when my song and soul are gone
Shall seek my form in thee,—
Tell them of one for whom ’twas best
To flee away and be at rest!
[In the autumn of 1827, at the urgent request of Mr Alaric Watts, who was then forming a gallery of portraits of the living authors of Great Britain, Mrs Hemans was prevailed upon to sit for her picture. The artist selected on this occasion was Mr W. E. West, an American by birth, who had passed some time in Italy, and painted the last likeness ever taken of Lord Byron, and also one of Madame Guiccioli, which was engraved in one of the annuals. During his stay at Rhyllon, where he remained for some weeks, he finished three several portraits of Mrs Hemans—one for Mr Alaric Watts, one which is now in the possession of Professor Norton, and a third, which he most courteously presented to Mrs Hemans’ sister, to whom it was even then a treasure, and is now become one of inestimable value. This likeness, considered by her family as the best ever taken of her, is the one which suggested Mrs Hemans’s affecting lines, “To my own Portrait.” ... It is, however, only fair to repeat the remark already made, and in which all those who were accustomed to study the play of her features must concur—that there never was a countenance more difficult to transfer to canvass; so varying were its expressions, and so impossible is it to be satisfied with the one which can alone be perpetuated by the artist. The great charm of Mr West’s picture is its perfect freedom from any thing set or constrained in the air; and the sweet, serious expression, so accordant with her maternal character, which recalls her own lines—
“Mother! with thine earnest eye
Ever following silently;”
and which made one of her children remark, in glancing from it to the bust, executed some years after by Mr Angus Fletcher[386]—“The bust is the poetess, but the picture is all mother.”—Memoir, p. 129-130.]
[386] An engraving from Mr Fletcher’s admirable bust forms the frontispiece to the present volume.