Excerpt from Contemporary Portraits (Third Series) You might as well try to paint a wave and at the same time, its chemical constituents and its myriad animal'culae. You think of your friend's chief Characteristic, the most prominent and peculiar trait of his nature and before you have got it on the paper, you recognize that he might correct you and declare that the opposite and antagonistic quality had guided him again and again and in fact finally determined his life's course. Each one of us is made up of a myriad contradictories and no man has been able as yet to paint, his own spirit in its entirety, let alone a stranger's, for we are all strangers one to another and lonely from the cradle to the grave, alone and forlorn. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.