Copley made some very fine
pictures that he remembered seeing when he was a boy. Used to remember
some lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,
"Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last."
And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother of
his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and looking,
not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. The dead young
mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look at him
so many, many years ago. He stood still as if in a waking dream, his
eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and they
ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of the
glimmering light through which he saw them.--What is there quite so
profoundly human as an old man's memory of a mother who died in his
earlier years? Mother she remains till manhood, and by-and-by she grows
to be as a sister; and at last, when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he
looks back upon her in her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he
caresses, not his parent, but, as it were, his child.
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