Page:Journal of Conversations with Lord Byron.pdf/23

 visit, however, my eyes were very busy in finishing for memory a portrait of the celebrated and beautiful woman before me.

"The portrait of Lady Blessington in the 'Book of Beauty' is not unlike her, but it is still an unfavorable likeness. A picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence hung opposite me, taken, perhaps, at the age of eighteen, which is more like her, and as captivating a representation of a just matured woman, full of loveliness and love, the kind of creature with whose divine sweetness the gazer's heart aches, as ever was drawn in the painter's most inspired hour. The original is no longer dans sa première jeunesse. Still she looks something on the sunny side of thirty. Her person is full, but preserves all the fineness of an admirable shape; her foot is not pressed in a satin slipper, for which a Cinderella might long be sought in vain; and her complexion (an unusually fair skin, with very dark hair and eyebrows) is of even a girlish delicacy and freshness. Her dress, of blue satin, (if I am describing her like a milliner, it is because I have here and there a reader in my eye who will be amused by it,) was cut low, and folded across her bosom, in a way to show to advantage the round and sculpture-like curve and whiteness of a pair of exquisite shoulders; while her hair, dressed close to her head, and parted simply on her forehead with a rich feronier of turquoise, enveloped in clear outline a head with which it would be difficult to find a fault, Her features are regular, and her mouth, the most expressive of them, has a ripe fulness and freedom of play peculiar to the Irish