[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.
NO MORE.
No more! A harp-string’s deep and breaking tone,
A last, low, summer breeze, a far-off swell,
A dying echo of rich music gone,
Breathe through those words—those murmurs of farewell—