The family correspondence, published by her grandson, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, gives us a delightful picture of the home-life of Jane Emmet during these years. She saw her husband honoured among the noblest of the land. She saw her children grow up about her, her girls beautiful and accomplished and altogether charming: her sons clever and successful, heirs to their father’s unstained integrity, as to his commanding abilities. The family had a summer residence on the old Middle Road, New York, and a winter abode in town—but the “Middle Road” was so attractive that the whole year was not infrequently passed there. All sorts of frolics enlivened their stay there, fancy dress balls and musical entertainments not to speak of practical jokes, in which the humour of the family took intense delight. As the sons and daughters got married, the new daughters, and sons thus added served but to widen the charming family circle, not to break it up.
In November, 1827, Jane Emmet had the supreme grief of losing her husband—a grief which was shared by all America—which “paid his love by reverencing his genius.”
Jane Emmet survived her husband nineteen years, dying at the house of her son-in-law on November 10th, 1846.
The noble words of Dr. Madden are the fittest tribute to her memory:
“The widow of Thomas Addis Emmet survived her husband nineteen years. She had shared in his sorrows and his sufferings—had been his companion in prisonment in Kilmainham gaol, and in captivity in Fort George—not for days, or weeks, or months, but for years. She had accompanied him in exile to the Continent and to the land of his adoption, and there she shared in his honours and the felicity of his later years.
“The woman who encountered so many privations and trials as she had done—who had been accustomed to all the enjoyments of a happy home, and
‘Had slept with full content about her bed,
And never waked but to a joyful morning.’
When deprived of all ordinary comforts, of the commonest appliances of these to the humblest state of life, during the imprisonment of her husband in Dublin; and was subjected necessarily to many restraints during the dreary imprisonments at Fort George—seemed ever to those who were the companions of her husband’s captivity as ‘one who, in suffering all things, suffered nothing.’ She fulfilled with heroic fortitude the duties of a devoted wife towards her husband in all his trials in his own country; was the joy and comfort of his life in a foreign land, where the exiled patriot, honoured and revered, in course of time rose to the first distinction in his profession; she died far away from her native land—but her memory should not be forgotten in Ireland.
“This excellent woman, full of years, rich in virtue, surrounded by affectionate children—prosperous, happily circumstanced, dutiful and loving children to her, worthy of their inheritance of a great name, and of the honour that descended to them from the revered memory of her truly noble husband—thus terminated in a foreign land a long career, chequered by many trials, over which a virtuous woman’s self-sacrificing devotion, the courage and constancy of a faithful wife, the force of a mother’s love eventually prevailed. The portrait of this lady is in the possession of Mr. John Patten.[[75]] The time may come when this intimation may be of some avail. Ireland has its Cornelias, its Portias—matrons worthy of association in our thoughts with Cato’s daughter, the mother of the children who were the jewels of her heart—with the wife of Russell, of Lavalette—but Ireland has no national gallery for the pictures and busts of her illustrious children—no literature for a record of the ‘noble deeds of women’ of her own land.”